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Martyn’s plan to escape has ended in exemplary catastrophic failure.

Considering how catastrophic failure usually goes, it could have gone worse. Martyn could have drowned, for one.

Instead, he’s only got a big cut up his leg, no food, no possessions, nothing but the clothes on his back and the key to the black box on the ship that’s just sunk off shore—the black box that held dragons’ horns worth more than their weight in gold, horns that Martyn had been helping the captain of the crew collect for months out at sea now.

He’s probably still in debt, unless he wants to go competitively swimming for sunken coin again. But now he’s presumed dead, so he’s sort of winning. Debtors zero, Martyn very questionably one.

Also, the island the wreckage washed ashore on was inhabited once, and it has a lighthouse.

The roof is a blessing when the island is washed with rain the next day. Martyn spends it exhausted in a heap on the floor, waiting for the bucket he laid outside to fill with rainwater. The following day he loots the bodies that have washed up on the beach or into the shallows, giving Martyn more boots than he’s ever had and probably ever will again, and plenty of clothes he can wear or shred into bandages for his foot. He stitches up his leg with a sewing box left dusty in a shelf underneath the lighthouse stairs.

He spends most of the night aching. He can’t dream much, but he does stay awake long enough to start thinking about all his mistakes. What a good time! Thank you, Martyn’s brain.

Martyn thinks about, for example, getting out of debtor’s prison by going on a fool’s errand to hunt down sea dragons and steal their horns. Pretty big regret, actually. He could have just not gotten caught, and then he’d be in trouble, but, like, there’d be a lot of other people like him also in trouble. Together. And there would be hot food. And fruit. Apples, maybe.

Martyn thinks about how his master plan to suck up to the captain worked too well and she decided to make him her successor—not first mate, though, just someone she could show what you could do with a sea dragon’s crown, if you placed it in the right chalk array or drenched it in the right potion. Instead of, you know, teaching him something about reading maps. Or running a ship. Or doing a real job that would do him any good whatsoever.

Martyn thinks about her hand on his shoulder when a harpoon flew, dead eye shot, into a sea dragon’s side in the water. About the water foaming pink. He should have just left at that point—feigned weakness—maybe she would have believed him.

Martyn thinks about putting the first crown in the black box on his own, the captain watching him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t bugger up the lock somehow, given his history of thieving. It felt cool and liquid in his hand, slicker than oil, smooth as the dark in the night time. He should have stolen at least one, just to sell and escape with the money.

Martyn thinks about having to wait, once, to enter the captain’s chambers. They needed time to clean up the body and space for the captain to open the black box all on her own and sweep out the useless pair of horns. It fell apart in the shortest span of time, foul, into something like frog spawn or old algae. She showed him before she dumped it overboard. It was crucial, she said, that he understood what was at stake here. You must never kill a sea dragon but in self-defense. As long as the body is breathing, the crown will survive.

Martyn thinks about breaking a sea dragon’s nose in self-defense. Not a proper sea dragon, one of the ones in human shape. A good regret, really. There hadn’t been any need for it to come to blows. The part of the hold where they were kept was miserable, anyway, soaked into the timbers of the ship. It felt and smelled and ached of creatures trapped, desperate, in pain. Martyn should have known not to reach out like that. Even if he was trying to get them all out.

Martyn thinks about tossing the harpoons overboard, once. A heavy bundle of sharp iron that probably cost more than half his debt all together. It got him beat soundly. The sea dragon they were hunting still died, so it was pointless all around. Very reasonable regret.

More bafflingly, though, Martyn thinks about filching the key. Doesn’t make much sense that the key, of all things, is something he’d regret. It was going to be his escape, and the sea dragons’ escapes, too, and probably the escapes of the poor souls who got in the way of the sea dragons and the water. He spins it in his hands, watching the low embers’ gleam along its long and jagged length, and realizes the reason he’s thinking about it is because he wished he’d acted sooner.

The day after that, Martyn’s second-worst nightmare walks through the door, wearing a ragged shirt and pants, a jacket with the sleeves ripped off, and holding a spear two feet taller than him.

“I’m looking for someone,” a sea dragon says, nailing Martyn with a dead stare. Sea dragons get this way, of course, when they’ve been unwittingly parted from their crown, and probably worse from being in the bottom of a ship. Martyn is vaguely familiar. “They took something from me, and I would like it back.”

Martyn, if you must know, is sitting in the floor trying to figure out how to make potatoes edible, like a bedraggled sea clown. “Uh,” he manages, “who?”

“It would have been the captain of the ship that passed by here.”

Passed by is very generous. Carefully, in case the words get him killed, Martyn says, “She’s dead.”

Carefully, the sea dragon replies, “What.”

Martyn gets to his feet. His every move is tracked. The key in his pocket is burning a brand on his leg. “She’s dead, she—”

“Show me,” he says. The sea dragon shifts his spear in his hand, preparing to be dangerous, and Martyn has to face the regrettable fact that he could probably not convince him to go away, or to forget all this happened. His only option is befriending the person who will probably have good reason to kill him.

Ah, well, it happens.

“Let me, uh—“ Martyn hobbles gingerly across the floor, testing his leg. “I think she washed up on the shore, somewhere,” he says. “Follow me.”

The captain doesn’t look too bad yet. Still recognizable as a person at some point, for one. Her hat is gone, but her medals and ribbons are still there. It must be the right person, because the sea dragon stabs the blunt edge of the spear in the sand to leave it standing upright, stares vacantly at the body for a second, and kicks the head soundly.

Twice.

“Fucking kidding me,” the sea dragon says. Then, to Martyn: “Did you see where the ship crashed?” and then, in general, when Martyn waves helplessly towards the shallow ocean: “Fuck!”

Martyn feels too bad to feign ignorance quite yet; he watches the sea dragon stalk along the sand for a minute, clenching and unclenching his hands, waiting for him to calm down a little before breaking more bad news. He does not calm down. He rips the spear out of the sand and stabs it through the captain’s dead heart.

Martyn takes a couple of steps back.

“I win,” he says, with a hand still on the spear. “You’re dead now, and my heart is buried at the bottom of the ocean, and I’m still alive. I,” he says, drawing the words out slow, “win.”

The sea dragon twists the spear before ripping it out. Martyn is beginning to have some small regrets. Small. Negligible.

Slightly larger regrets when he walks off without acknowledging Martyn at all. Maybe Martyn’s just going to be alone on this island…?

Ah, yeah, and he’s walking into the sea. Without his crown. Looking like a person. Drownable. Okay. Martyn may as well go back to the lighthouse, if he’s not going to spend the last hours of daylight to befriend anyone. It’s hard to change bandages in the dark.

He does briefly consider tying some rocks to the captain’s body and casting it out a little further adrift, if only to keep everything weighed down for the fish and crabs to get to it. In a kind of burial—better than this, getting picked at by gulls and the occasional sandpiper and crabs. And then he remembers what the captain was like.

Martyn thinks, ah, what the hell. And spits on the captain’s body before he leaves.

..

The sea dragon is back the next morning.

Martyn spent a very unpleasant night in the abandoned lighthouse. He wasn’t brave enough to try the blankets left upstairs, because it seemed they had developed a kind of crust, so he’d curled up on the floor in front of the hearth with driftwood snapping in the fireplace and his arm as a pillow. He wakes up thirsty, starving, and at least thirty percent sand. It’s in between his teeth.

When he creaks the massive door open and squints against the bright, overpowering line of sunrise frothing the far edge of the sea red, Martyn’s doom is standing out on the rocks, spear in hand, motionless. Fishing.

He looks like every artifice of the modern world is a joke he’s decided to engage in, ageless, ancient, like he’s another outcropping of the rock that decided to have hands and feet and a tongue to speak with. He fits exactly here, with the surf and the onshore wind and the seagulls circling. One of the birds pulls into a steep dive, to snag a wayward fish out of the water, splashing the figure. He does not move. A couple more gulls dive, too, to fish something silver out of the water.

Like an afterthought, he snags a seagull out of the air and cracks its head on the stone he’s standing on.

Martyn feels his heart drop a couple of beats. Cool. Cool! He doesn’t think he’s seen anyone move that fast before. Okay!

Martyn jerks his head back inside before he’s spotted, and pokes the hearth. It’s too drafty in here—the fire went out before Martyn woke up, but there are coals now, and drafts can be fixed. Can sea dragons eat birds raw?

He can guess.

Between the sand and the bandages Martyn feels fairly confident his foot is doing just fine. He makes it about twenty feet past the bottom of the lighthouse stairs before he feels like a wise career path for him going forward would be a job that required only one leg, or maybe no legs whatsoever. They are such a pain—oh, ha, pain. Haha. Ha.

Doesn’t matter anymore, because he waves his arm to catch the sea dragon’s attention. For a moment he does nothing, before waving curtly back. Okay. Martyn’s got to be so charming and friendly or he’s not making it out alive, and worse, he won’t even get breakfast.

“Hello!” Martyn starts. Good start. Great start. “What’ve you got?”

“What?”

“I said,” Martyn raises his voice a little more over the wind, “What’ve you got?”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why are you asking?”

Martyn takes the earned excuse of getting his breath back before he replies. It brings the sea dragon into earshot, he hopes. “I have an excellent offer for you,” Martyn says.

“Oh, really,” he says, slowing.

“Raw bird isn’t very tasty,” Martyn says, “But I’d rather not start eating the charcoal in the bottom of my fireplace, so, y’know, with our powers combined, I think we could make something amazing. For the small fee of half the bird, of course,” Martyn almost forgets to add.

The sea dragon eyes him, slowly, considering. Martyn can pick out the hairline fractures along either side of his throat that mark where gills might never open again. Martyn is reminded of the key in his pocket. He was thinking about it already, he’s always thinking about the key, but now he’s thinking about it twice as hard.

This guy recognizes him for sure. Martyn’s going to be so very stabbed about this. Could he run? Maybe he could—no, probably not, Martyn’s foot reminds him. Right. No running.

“Okay,” he says. Wait, what?

“Wait,” Martyn says, “what?”

The sea dragon’s eyebrows arch sharply. “What, what?”

“I thought you’d refuse.”

“Refuse your excellent offer,” the sea dragons says flatly. “What, were we both just going to live on this island ignoring each other? Your leg’s going to get infected,” and he gestures with the butt end of the spear at Martyn’s—well, he’s probably aiming for the buggered leg, but he gestures at Martyn’s everything—“and you just want me to watch you die?”

“Uh,” Martyn adds, thoughtfully, to the conversation.

“That’d be pointless,” the sea dragon says. “How would I learn how to light a fire?”

“Sorry, I—wait, fire? Can’t you—”

“My name is Scott, by the way,” the sea dragon says, turning and walking up the steep sun-bleached staircase to the lighthouse.

“My name is Martyn,” he calls up after him, hobbling up stairs that he’s pretty sure were steeper than they were ten minutes ago. He makes a very respectable speed up the stairs after Scott, and shows him how to light a fire without matches, and what must be eight thousand years later Martyn finally gets a fresh breakfast. It is delicious.

..

They cook a few more meals in the hearth, enough to keep their minds from being shot from hunger. Martyn plants a few potatoes that haven’t been ruined from the salt and waters them with water from the singular stream on the island. Scott shows him what clams are edible if you cook them. It rains again, and Scott drags him outside to grab seaweed that’s washed ashore before it even stops raining.

Martyn thinks about the key the whole time.

The good news is, he’s right on track to either befriending Scott enough that it wouldn’t matter if Martyn revealed the key after all; he might believe Martyn if he feigns innocence, and he might forgive him if Martyn keeps laying it on thick. Might. Perhaps the best news of all is that Martyn’s pretty sure Scott would feel bad if he had to kill Martyn.

In fact, Martyn’s got a pretty good idea of what he can do to prove that he can be trustworthy no matter what; he can find the wreckage with Scott, find the black box, and give him the key.

Problem being, of course, that Scott will swim off into the open ocean if Martyn does that—and at that point, even if Martyn did want to go back to civilization, he’d be doubly fucked on the account that he had no [pelt] to pawn and a lot of people who’d love to talk to him about incarceration options.

It isn’t even a last-ditch option. It’s an impossibility.

But he can pretend to put in the attempt, which will nearly be as good as the real thing.

Martyn can’t just show up to the sea dragon to break this idea, obviously. That would be the foolish approach. He’s got to bring gifts. Like food.

Martyn cooks some fish and bird eggs. He settles it on a plate, miraculously undamaged, that he found upstairs. He settles a shallow bowl next to it full of fresh water. There are no utensils, unless you want to use sticks, but Martyn’s been eating things with his hands for about a week now, so it’s probably not impolite to show up without a fork.

Maybe if he just acts friendly it won’t go badly! This has never worked for him in the past, but he’s worse at the other kind of manipulation tactic.

It’s fine.

Martyn hobbles down to the beach left of the lighthouse, which has sand that’s very nearly soil. Snakes and birds and reeds flourish there. Scott is on the edge, thigh deep in water, working a bundle of reeds into some kind of shape on the surface. The gulls maintain a healthy distance from him, from intimidation factor but mostly because of the gull body count Scott has going.

“I’ve got breakfast,” Martyn calls.

“Give me a minute,” comes the reply. “Busy.”

This close Martyn has an idea of what he’s making—a raft, or a floating device, because it looks like a strange start for a raft—unless Scott is going to make four, and put one on each corner of a raft to buoy it up. Scott is pulling the first part of the bundle together with twine, and leans down into the water to loop it around.

You look like you’ve got an idea,” Scott points out.

Martyn can feel the roots of his teeth. Oh, boy. “I do,” he says. “Shocker, I know.”

Scott makes his third pass with the twine and pulls it taut to make the nest of reeds circular. He tests them with his hand, dunks them once to check how well they float. If it’s a full-sized raft, Martyn thinks, it’s going to be a very round raft. Maybe it’s just for fun…?

“Well? Are you going to tell me what the idea is?” Scott says, starting to laugh. “Were you just amazed you had a thought?”

“Nearly,” Martyn says, to continue the joke. He just doesn’t want to say it, is the thing, but now Scott’s straightened up to stare at him expectantly. He clears his throat.

“Ships always have a bit that sinks,” Martyn starts. Hopefully this is not something Scott already knows, and he’s not coming off as condescending. “Like, cannons obviously, if they have those, but usually all ships have a part where they put all the money and important documents. It’s a metal box.”

“Yes?”

“I was thinking,” Martyn can feel the blood in his fingers, in his ears, in his mouth, “if you wanted to find whatever it is the captain stole from you, it’d be in there. You can still find it.”

Martyn has fucked up. Scott is immediately on guard, hardened again into an outcrop of rock that only the sea could meet without fear of danger, and Martyn realizes the best thing he can do is act about as half as scared as he feels, and backpedal.

“Sorry,” Martyn says. “Sorry. It seemed important to you.”

“it is.”

“I won’t say any more about it,” Martyn says. “Unless you want to go looking for it after all. In silence.”

Scott turns and looks, then, out to sea. He reads the breakers and currents. The sky. Tracks the huddle of seabirds that have settled on the shallow water above a sandbank. Martyn sees something new wash across his face.

“No,” Scott decides. “It’s gone.”

He’s lying.

It’s not gone. A sea dragon withers away without their crown; if you cut it, it’s like you’re cutting them. They feel where it is, they feel what condition it’s in. Scott knows it’s out there. He knows it’s intact. He’s lying.

But not to Martyn.

Martyn stands in the same place where he’d stopped, because he can’t set down the plate where the crabs or gulls will steal a bite, and he doesn’t think Scott wants him gone, exactly—it’s just there’s a brief lull in the conversation, as the worst of it blows over.

Scott leans down in the water, one hand keeping the bundle of reeds steady, and grabs a bright bony strand of what looks like lichen—

“Wow, coral?” Martyn says, caught off guard by how carefully Scott is weaving it into the matt. “What for?”

Scott shrugs. “I don’t want it to look ugly.”

“Very fair,” Martyn says. “Can I help?”

Scott snorts reflexively. “Sorry,” he says, “most of it’s underwater, so I, uh, I assume you won’t be diving for it.”

“I can dive,” Martyn says, bristling. “Who said I couldn’t dive?”

“Oh, my bad,” Scott says, brightly—still making fun of him, but this is a testing voice, to see if Martyn’s fucking with him or not. “I should have assumed someone who got seasick knew how to swim.”

“I definitely can,” Martyn says. “I’ve gone down twenty feet a go before, picking coi—I mean, pearls,” Martyn backpedals. “I would never steal. Me? Stealing? Nooo.”

“Sure, well,” Scott says, turning around to grab one of his weird bags full of holes, “if you can ‘not steal’ some coral from the bottom of the sea for me—let me be clear, the stuff that’s broken off from the storm, do not rip the fucking coral off the stalk, I’m definitely going to drown you if—”

“Got it,” Martyn says, and shoves the plate into Scott’s hands and dives into the ocean before Scott can look like he regrets asking for help any longer.

..

“C’mon,” Scott insists, tugging at Martyn’s arm. If Martyn didn’t know better, he’d say he was grinning. “C’mon, you definitely wanna see this.”

“See what?” Martyn is doing a little home renovation in the lighthouse. He’s pretty sure he saw mice in here, and there are a few stairs broken through on the inside where they are dry-rottted wood, and there’s a small leak in the roof better patched sooner than later. He can put it aside, though, if Scott stops acting weird and just tells him what it is.

“It’s really cool,” Scott says. He looks genuinely enthused. Martyn feels… afraid? Intrigued? “I think it could be a shelter in the future, if we need to store food there long-term.”

“What’s wrong with the lighthouse?” Martyn feigns insult, but he’s listening, and Scott knows he is.

Scott tugs his arm again. “If you don’t want to see it, it’s your loss, and anyway,” Scott points out, “You’re repairing the lighthouse right now, how could it be good for storing anything?”

Martyn heaves a big gusty sigh. “Fine,” he says. “If it’s another octopus I’m turning around.”

“It’s not another octopus.”

Scott takes him down to the rockier part of the shoreline, where the rocks are dark and black and tide pools have formed in partnership with the coast. This time, they walk along the edge of the forest instead of the edge of the sea, and at one point Scott takes one more steep step downwards and vanishes.

“Scott?”

His head pops up one more time, beaming. “Come down here,” Scott says, and Martyn shuffles to the edge of what is apparently a pretty slim entrance to a shallow cave.

“Oh, weird,” Martyn says.

“It gets weirder,” Scott says, and grins. He slips further into the cave before Martyn can ask what could possibly be weirder than a pretty weirdly shaped cave, and Martyn is forced to follow.

The walls are jagged, narrow, and at a slant. Martyn braces his hands against one side to walk through without scraping against the rock. Light disappears, until it’s just the gleam of wet stone, and even that dims.

“Careful up ahead,” Scott says, voice echoing, and then the next time Martyn goes to brace himself upright his hand slips on empty air.

“How big is this cave?” Martyn says, squinting pointlessly in the dark. The sparse glimmers of sunlight cast more of a dim glow than anything useful.

“Pretty big,” Scott says. “It floods every high tide, but there is a higher spot up here, where I think it stays completely dry. We could put some things in here. Like uh… maybe a getaway package, if it’s ever too dangerous to stay.”

“Huh,” Martyn contributes. He still can’t see anything. If he waited a bit, he might be able to make out the floor. His only indication of Scott’s location are his noisy footsteps.

“I’m more used to underwater caves, and those get dangerous fast,” Scott says. “Maybe we could keep going in this one. I dunno.”

“Could live here,” Martyn says. He’s not a hundred percent behind that idea honestly. This cave is doing weird things to him.

“Are you alright?”

“Me?”

“No, the other Martyn.”

“Sorry,” Martyn says. “Bit out of it.”

“You look kind of pale,” Scott says. His footsteps clatter across the rock, heading vaguely towards Martyn, back out of the depths of the cave.

“Scott,” Martyn says, frowning. “Can you see?”

Scott stops walking.

Scott is probably freaking out about giving away the fact that he can see in the dark. Personally, Martyn is freaking out about being in a ship for months, and not going out much at night, and thinking about the hold, pitch dark because sea dragons didn’t need to burn oil to see, about all those eyes watching him while he was blind.

“I haven’t got torches or anything, and it’s pitch dark to me,” Martyn says, straining for lightness in his voice. “Mind sharing an eyeball or two?”

“For a premium fee,” Scott says at last, very calmly. A joke. Martyn pretends to laugh. “Come on, you’re wilting. Go back to the entrance.”

Scott leads him back out to the sun. Much brighter than Martyn remembers, which means that his eyes were adjusting fine, which means the cave is just dark. Martyn feels so very normal about that.

“I’m going to go get a torch,” Scott says, laughing at Martyn without really laughing. “Don’t pass out.”

Martyn waves him away. He needs a few minutes to process everything, and to not go insane, and figure out if he even wants to go back in the cave. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t but if Scott’s bringing back a torch that is just for him, he might as well try.

Martyn squints out the cave, one hand braced against the sunlight. He thinks it’s a rodent—no, a cat? Are there cats on this island after all? Surely gulls can’t get that big—

And then the amorphous body splits, into panting mouth, body, legs and wagging tail, dark fur gleaming in the sun.

It’s a dog.

He can spot a collar slung around its neck.

Martyn stops breathing a little bit.

They’re probably not looking for him or Scott—unless of course it is a dragon-hunting dog, which would mean that Martyn’s luck is worse than he ever could have imagined—but he can’t imagine any possibility where an explanation would be easy, or simple, or end in them parting ways. Mostly because the only shipping line with the capital to send people out this far must be some kind of trading company.

Martyn waits until he’s sure he hasn’t been spotted. He leans out of the cave, slow, and peeks over the shoreline to see what else there might be.

There is a dinghy grounded on the shore.

It’s far away, still, but not so far away that Martyn can’t scan the horizon for the one it came from—a supply ship, a few dark cannon-holes on its side, holding steady.

Martyn pulls back into the cave. Scott either needs to be taking a long time in the lighthouse, or needs to have been walking down the shoreline very slowly and quietly. What if these are treasure hunters? Martyn wishes he had some sort of weapon with him—should he step out right now and act like he’s gone mad living here for twenty years?

The dog picks its way across the tide pools, pawing the water. It snaps its teeth at something. Martyn strains his ears for shouting, for whistling, for footsteps—

Footsteps.

Very quiet ones, coming down from the lighthouse. Martyn picks up a rock, breathing out of his mouth. There are about two ways someone would know he is in this cave. Either Scott is fine, and he’s got no idea what’s going on, and he’s going to walk in here and ask why Martyn’s being so freaky, or—

Martyn relaxes the smallest fraction when he catches a glimpse of Scott walking into eyeshot of Martyn, as well as eyeshot of the dog. Then he grabs a fistful of Scott’s shirt and pulls him into the cave.

“Shhhh,” Martyn’s saying over whatever protests Scott had.

Scott is staring at him, confused, from the heart-stopping distance of about four inches. Martyn can pick out his pale eyelashes, and the ripples of his irises, and Scott’s breath on Martyn’s mouth—

Martyn whips up an arm and skins his knuckles on the rock ow ow ow and presses a finger to Scott’s lips, quiet. Scott is immediately indignant, but doesn’t say a word, gesturing wildly—

Martyn points around the edge of the entrance, to the dog and the supply boat.

Scott’s eyes don’t go wide, but his expression freezes, very carefully, in the same indignant-angry-annoyed expression. Who, Scott mouths, or maybe What, but Martyn shakes his head. They just need to be still and quiet, and maybe this will go away.

The dog snuffles around on the beach so long that the water to the entrance of the cave begins to lap around their ankles again, tide coming back in. After long last, its head whips up—down the beach, towards where the dinghy landed—and it bounds back to where it came from.

Martyn makes to leave, and Scot pins him back against the wall, shaking his head. They get into a silent gesture argument that gets so fierce that Scott douses out the torch he brought to argue with it, but Martyn concedes, if only to escape later while Scott’s guard is down.

They wait.

When it’s dark enough that human eyes can’t see, they crawl out, and immediately go in opposite directions; Martyn, into the small dense forest in the center of the island, and Scott, back to the lighthouse.

“Where are you going?” Scott asks, low, half baffled and mostly still annoyed.

“Not to the lighthouse,” Martyn says. “They’ll see it and search it first.”

“It’ll be more suspicious if they find all of our stuff there, and we’re hiding.”

“They won’t be able to kill us, though.”

“You don’t know that! We might be able to scare them off!”

“We don’t know how many there are!”

Scott turns at once and runs down the beach to the water’s edge, extremely visible, Martyn might add, and suspicious to boot.

“What are you doing,” Martyn hisses, and Scott ignores him and dives under the water briefly. He stays almost too long, and then bundles his legs beneath him and stands, just tall enough to shake the water off his face.

“Eight people arrived by boat,” Scott says. “And the dog. As long as eight people and a dog leave, we should be okay.”

Martyn chooses not to comment on that at all. It’s well beyond the scope of what a normal person could do, but it’s beyond his knowledge of sea dragons, too. The captain never told him about what sea dragons could do, only that they were dangerous. All the sea dragons ever seemed to be, to Martyn, was terrified. This is neither of those things, it’s altogether new, and if only there weren’t terrible things going on, Martyn would ask.

“Come on,” Scott says, because Martyn is standing there on the sand, doing nothing, and runs back to the lighthouse. They don’t sleep all night, but rest there in the floor, listening, waiting for the worst handful of bad things to happen, four feet apart.

Scott falls asleep shortly before dawn.

Martyn hears his breathing change into something less tense, something even. He turns onto his side and is out like a light on the thin rug that’s laid across the second floor. Martyn waits, counting as high as he can in his head, before rolling over and standing up, quiet as a mouse.

Scott doesn’t move.

He creeps down the stairs, taking his time to ensure the creaks are mitigated or silent, skipping the last stair. He walks past the cold hearth and cracks open the door, to stare against the sun towards where the supply ship is.

Gone.

It doesn’t mean everything—they still need to check, that someone wasn’t left behind to hunt them down or leave some sign that the next ship that passes by should stop here. But their chances are better, now.

Martyn leans his forehead against the doorjamb and heaves a sigh.

And then he pushes the door open, and walks outside, to close it behind him.

“Where are you going?”

Martyn startles. Hard. He looks up to see Scott, only halfway down the stairs, confused—and underneath that something else, something Martyn can’t recognize.

“Just,” Martyn clears his throat, “I’m just checking.”

“They’re gone,” Scott says, “right?”

“Yeah,” Martyn resettles his hand on the outside of the door, this is stupid, he can’t slam it in Scott’s face, he can’t just trap him here, literally can’t, the lighthouse has windows, but if they find him—

“I thought you’d joined them and left me,” Scott says.

Martyn’s guts twist. He says, “I wouldn’t—”

“Good,” Scott says like a threat. “We’re going to make sure they’re gone together.”

Scott whose eyes just miss the mark for looking human. Scott, with lines down the sides of his neck and ribs marking sealed gills. Scott, who didn’t know how to start or feed a fire. Scott, who escaped less than a month ago from what was going to be the rest of his life, and can’t risk going back. Scott, whose crown of horns is buried in the silt out at sea, and Martyn doesn’t even know which pair is his, doesn’t know if any others made it out alive.

Martyn shifts to block the exit.

“Don’t,” Martyn says. More of a plea, if he’s being honest.

“Martyn,” Scott says, in one last warning.

“Just stay here,” Martyn says. “Please, I won’t go out of eyesight, I’ll be right back.”

Scott wordlessly picks up his spear. Martyn throws up his hands in defeat, and they both walk outside, to see what, if anything, they left behind.

They sweep the island. Scott checks the fish, or the currents, or whatever; all of them are gone. All they find is a cooking fire, littered with fish bones and charred scales.

..

Martyn does, in fact, get an infected leg.

Scott is a bit smug about it, considering Martyn has been denying the possibility this entire time. He graciously helps Martyn out once he admits he was wrong, and Martyn must have said something humiliating while he was delirious because Scott point-blank refuses to mention it.

But his leg gets better for real this time. He picks out the stitches a few weeks later.

Being shipwrecked is a lot of work. Martyn is inexpertly preparing for the rainy season, trying to figure out which fruits are edible, how to smoke fish, how to dry seaweed. He finally finishes cleaning out the lighthouse and repairing the roof, and then he starts working on window covers; he’s halfway through a shutter when Scott points out it’d be easier to just use layers of palm leaves.

Food, at least, is no issue anymore; stockpiling is hard but there’s no issue finding something to eat at least once a day. There is a lot of fresh greenery, too. The potatoes are coming on fine even though they’re thousands of miles away from where they were first dug up.

Scott is still working on his mat. Floating reef. Raft?

“Oh,” Martyn says. “It’s going to be very, uh, cozy.”

“It’s going to grow,” Scott says, a bit icily. Martyn backpedals with some platitude about how Scott would definitely know more about this, Martyn’s a landlubber, he’s sure it’s going to be beautiful when it’s larger, yada yada. Martyn breaks off to go do something else more productive. And to not trample any longer on Scott’s last nerve.

..

Martyn, in his own time, makes something he’s very pleased with.

“It’s a hammock!” Martyn says. “Come on, sit down.”

“It looks uncomfortable,” Scott says, but he’s smiling. He sits down on half the hammock.

“Now we can swing back and forth if we want,” Martyn says. “Or just sit here.”

“Is that it?”

“Yeah,” Martyn says. “Well—hold on, what do you mean, is that it? What, do your seats have to have something interesting or you refuse to sit down?”

“It has something interesting in it,” Scott says, smiling harder. “That’s why I sat down.”

“Well, thank you kindly,” Martyn says. “You know, I think bedraggled is going to become really fashionable, so I’m investing, you know?

“Don’t flatter yourself too much,” Scott says. “I said interesting, not marriage material.”

“You wound me,” Martyn says, or tries to say, because Scott swings hard and Martyn goes tumbling off the hammock. It’s about a three foot drop but the air gets knocked out of him anyway.

“Martyn?” Scott leans over the edge of the hammock. Laughing at him. Martyn is also laughing, to be fair. “Oh my goodness, are you okay?”

Martyn waits for his lungs to start working again. “Okay,” he manages. “No thanks to you.”

“You were getting full of yourself, I had to knock you down a peg.”

Martyn holds out a hand. “Pull me up,” he says. He is going to pull Scott down with him.

“You’re just going to pull me down,” Scott says. “Get up here yourself, you’ve got legs.”

Martyn voices his complaints but climbs into the hammock all on his own, one leg crossed and the other just low enough to sway the hammock back and forth. This time he leans back on the hammock, facing Scott.

“Okay, I think I’m starting to get it,” Scott says. “This isn’t half bad.”

Martyn did not have a hammock to sleep on—he had a cot in the floor, and over time developed a subconscious ability to not roll around in his sleep on the ship. It gives him enough space to appreciate hammocks.

“I thought you would have left already,” Scott adds.

“Um,” Martyn says, suddenly out of breath again. “What?”

“For,” Scott gestures out at the red line of the sea, the stars coming down to rest in the sky, “I don’t know, wherever you were before.”

“I,” Martyn says. He has—he’s. Um.

“I’ve got nothing left, obviously,” Scott says, “but you’ve got plans, you can’t be stuck here forever.”

Martyn manages, “How do you know I’ve got plans to be in a hammock?”

Scott looks at him, at last, to say, “Yeah,” a phrase which means “Yeah, right.”

“I’ve, uh,” Martyn clears his throat. “I’ve been saving stuff for the rainy season, not to leave.”

“And after that?”

“Let me finish,” Martyn says, and he can’t think of a single thing to say after that. His mind is spinning in circles. He’s so close to winning the heart of someone consigned to give up, and keep giving up, the one thing Martyn had set out for, and now Martyn’s not even sure it’s what he wanted. “Look—look.”

“I’m looking,” Scott says, suspiciously even.

“I,” Martyn says, “washed up here, with nothing. Alone. I thought that was the best it was going to get, because I’m—sort of being hunted? Where I came from. Probably by multiple people at this point. But this is my—this is—Scott, I thought you were going to leave,” Martyn says. “And I’ve been trying to convince you this whole time not to.”

“Oh,” Scott says.

“Which now that I think about it is pretty stupid, I guess we both thought that,” Martyn says. “But you had every reason to. You’re better at the sea than I am, you can swim better than I can, all I can do is light fires—and I showed you how to do that.”

“Are you stupid?” Scott says, leaning close. Martyn wishes he’d stop doing that thing with his face so he can figure out how Scott’s really feeling, instead of just guessing, angry, afraid, vengeful, miserable. “That’s not how that works. We needed each other and we’ll need each other still.”

“And you’ll get tired of me,” Martyn says.

“And you, me,” Scott says. “But not like what you’re thinking. I don’t just need you, Martyn.”

He should give the key to Scott, right now.

“Come here,” Scott says, still unreadable, still too quiet, and Martyn lets him pull him closer. Scott flips him so they both lie lengthwise along the hammock, and Scott rests his chin on Martyn’s head.

Martyn’s entire nervous system shakes him in rapturous applause, saying stay here, right here, don’t move for the next eighty years.

“I’m sorry,” Martyn says. He can’t get enough air. “I’m sorry, I’ll be right back, it’s not you.”

He pulls away and breaks for the lighthouse.

The entire time Martyn is screaming at himself, what are you doing, because there are about fifty ways this could have gone and he’s chosen the least satisfying ending, where he runs to the third floor and hides behind the door and knots his hands in his hair. He’s going to have to fix things in the morning, and hope Scott doesn’t take it too personally.

Scott takes it exactly personally enough to walk very quietly up the stairs ten minutes later, and stop outside the door.

“I can hear you breathing,” Scott says through the door, quiet. “Are you awake?”

Martyn doesn’t say anything. He’s pretty sure if he starts talking now, he’s going to explain everything.

Scott sits down in the stairwell opposite the door. Martyn’s not ready for this conversation, not by a mile; he can’t lie about why he knows what a sea dragon is, he just can’t.

Martyn does, however, unfurl slightly, the better to hear what Scott is saying.

“Spooking you wasn’t supposed to happen,” Scott says. “I was going to tell you, I just didn’t have the right time for it. It’s hard to find the right time for that.”

Martyn has the terrible realization that Scott has come up here to apologize. For being a sea dragon. Which Martyn has been more or less keeping captive in the bottom of a ship for months, to use their horns as magic loci. Martyn is such an asshole.

“I know you,” and Scott’s voice is quiet as ash, “from before. I recognized your voice. I heard you shouting once on the ship before my heart was stolen. But I didn’t see your face while I was in the sea, so it took me a while to realize.”

Oh.

Scott is not apologizing for being something he is. This is. Um. Worse.

“I think you were trapped on that ship like I was.” Scott laughs. “Well, technically—part of me is going to be there forever.

“I don’t know why you didn’t tell me. Maybe you didn’t realize I was there. But I’m glad you didn’t sink, too.”

Martyn is. On fire? He feels like he’s on fire. He should say something probably. Martyn says nothing.

“That’s all,” Scott says. “Thanks for listening.”

Scott leaves. Martyn doesn’t bother listening for the door to close behind him, because he is crying.

..

“Are you sure?” Scott says. “You don’t have to come, I know you can’t swim well.”

“I can swim fine,” Martyn says, key burning in his pocket. “Let’s go.”

Scott takes his reed raft out beyond the sandbar and breakers, swimming behind it like a turbine. Martyn stands upright, to scan for wreckage.

Scott did change his mind, as Martyn had suspected he would. They are going hunting for his second skin.

“I think it’s going to rain suddenly,” Scott calls up after a few minutes, pointing at a thick white drift of clouds. “Do you want to keep going?”

“Of course,” Martyn calls down after him.

Martyn’s never been in a proper squall before. The sky floods, and the top of the ocean froths, until the only difference between them is the temperature and the salt.

“I see it,” Martyn says, pointing down at a smudge underneath the water. “We need to dive for it!”

“It’s too—” Scott starts, and Martyn dives.

Martyn’s never gone swimming with this little light. But he can see twenty feet along the Captain’s chair, and coins glimmering even in this dim light, throwing their light up to the surface of the water; and he does see it, at last, the box with Scott’s crown, locked tight and waterproof.

It is very far down.

Martyn’s out of practice for diving. His head is pounding by the time he finally makes it to the black box. He tries lifting it. Even underwater, it’s too heavy to shift in the sand. Martyn only clouds the water around him.

Scott waves a hand in front of his face. Martyn startles, and squints at Scott—he’s pointing up. Martyn shakes his head and tries to lift the box again.

Scott slaps him. Underwater it’s pretty ineffective. Up, he mouths, which is to say, right now.

Martyn shakes his head, no, you go up. He’s going to be fine for a few seconds longer. He pulls out twine from his pocket, to tie a line from the box up to the surface.

Scott chokes beside him. Martyn feels more than hears it, and whips his head around in time to see Scott underneath a thin column of bubbles leading up to the surface. They need to leave, right now.

But Scott does not have his heart. He’s going to drown down here, in legs and arms and untidy hair.

Martyn, after days of diving to pick coral, is pretty good at snappy math.

Martyn pulls Scott close and kisses him.

He presses most of the air in his lungs into Scott’s, and then the key into his hand, only letting go when he feels Scott’s fingers curl absolutely around it. Through the salt, he sees Scott, caught off guard, eyes going wide. Then he pushes Scott down, towards the black box, and his freedom.

Scott is shaking his head, of course, tugging at Martyn’s arms uselessly. Up, he mouths, pointing, and his face is saying all the words Martyn wishes he could hear him say, like “you clueless fucking idiot.” Martyn, of course, suggests that Scott stay down here and open the box by pointing at it and then Scott in turn, and then Scott, cursing himself, cursing Martyn, more scared than Martyn has ever seen him, fumbles with the key in his hand and cracks open the box.

Air bellows out. Papers fly in its wake, ink bleeding, souring across the pages. Martyn’s lungs are on fire. He just needs to wait a little longer, and Scott digs through the box to pull out the rigid teal crown, pockmarked like living coral, split like antlers, and he digs it firmly into the top of his head.

Martyn convulsively exhales. He’s pretty sure his blood is on fire. Scott lengthens, and splits, and scales start showing up somewhere. Martyn’s past caring. He can ooh and ahh over it later. Scott drags him sideways through the water, and then in a slow arc up, unbearably slow, but much faster than Martyn could have managed; much more distance than Martyn could have made on his own.

For a minute, he thinks he might make it, anyway.

The swim to the surface is very far. The last real, conscious thought Martyn has is that drowning hurts. He is not awake for much longer.

..

Martyn is on grass.

There was only dune grass, on the island. This feels softer. He keeps his eyes closed for a while longer, to feel the sun’s patterns dance across them, and then he opens them.

The land rolls gently underneath him—but not like a hill, like a wave. It’s gentle, and tall, and he braces himself up on his elbows, lost.

He’s not on grass. He’s on flowers. He’s in a glade of them, thick, short flowers and leaves. His body makes a perfect impression where he laid. It looks like he’s been laying there for a long time.

There appears to be some coral stuck in his arm, mostly buried beneath the surface. He prods it, mystified. And there’s another piece, on his shoulder—is there some in his hair?

Bamboo towers above him. Tiny, sharply colored seabirds flitter around the leaves, making a racket; he can see the darkening band of leaves brushed together as another wave rolls through, over him. The birds seem perfectly used to it. Through the canebrake, he can see sugarcane, reeds and sedge, and through the blood in his ears he can make out singing—

Martyn was never great out at sea. He’s definitely not good at walking on it. He scrambles to his feet and only stays upright by his hand on the nearest bamboo. He’d like to run but all he can do is manage like, a really fast walk, it’s embarrassing, really—

The singing cuts off shortly after he crashes to a halt in the center of Scott’s island. He’s lashing a thick bundle of freshly cut poles together. He braces a foot on it and pulls the knot tight, straightening up, and goes silent at the sight of Martyn. Scott’s crown is back at place on his head, brilliant blue, and there are iridescent scales that catch the sunlight as it falls across him, gleaming.

Martyn should say something.

He can’t. There’s nothing to say. He could apologize out loud, like he couldn’t underwater; he could ask what happened; he could wisecrack; he could just say hello, like Scott’s been waiting for him to say for—for…

“You’re dead,” Scott says, very reasonably, rope dropped but shoulders still taut.

There’s only really one thing Martyn can reply to that with: “I got better.”

Scott huffs out a pitiful laugh for his godawful joke. It’s more than it deserved, really. Martyn’s throat feels about as hydrated as a pile of ash. He clears it and says, “You’ve, um, you’ve got—” and gestures around his eyes, to point out the brilliant scales that have apparently grown in around Scott’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Scott strangles out, mapping them out gingerly with his hand as if he’d forgotten they were there—“I forgot they were there.”—ah, fuck, Martyn’s so awkward. May as well go die of shame then.

“This is stupid,” Scott says, and starts walking forward, and that breaks the spell over Martyn too, which breaks in turn another spell over Scott until they are racing towards each other and collide. Scott feels warmer than Martyn remembers, and smells like fresh greenery and salt, and Martyn wants to kiss him but right now he’s going to hug him very tightly and wonder when his hair got so long it needed to be tied back.

“I tried,” Scott starts, and pulls back to stare in disbelief at Martyn again like he’s a new marvel, “I tried to—bring you back, but it didn’t,” and Scott laughs.

“I mean, I guess it did?” Martyn says, laughing too. “Don’t ask me, I’ve not a fuckin’ clue what, uh—”

Scott pleasantly surprises Martyn and kisses him. Martyn returns the surprise, and kisses him back.

Later, at night, when the only light is from the algae in the waves, they’re going to have a good long talk about things—about why Martyn had the key, for starters, and why he kept it for so long; how Scott tried to bring him back, and why Martyn has coral threaded through him; about when, exactly, Martyn gave up on tricking Scott into doing anything and tried to tell him the truth; but for now, Martyn’s had his legs cut out from underneath him again by the long wave under the grass, and he’s sprawled on the living island, and Scott is laughing at him now, backlit by the bright sky, and Martyn’s at least mostly sure he won’t have to come up with a convincing story for what really happened, because Scott will believe him, and Scott will understand, and for now, that’s enough.