Ebony Hill (2 page)

“Where’s Ness?” I hear Dev call.

His smile is wide as he pushes his way through the crowd. “Ness! How are you?”

Something melts inside me. Returning his smile, I stare at the face I know so well: dark-browed eyes, burnished skin, black hair caught at the nape of his neck with a leather thong. With my arms limp by my sides, I’m freshly aware of the awkwardness that newly lies between us.

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Dev says, and my eyes shift to the stranger who stands a pace behind him. “This is Ronan. Ronan, Ness.”

Ronan glances towards me and away. He’s my age, maybe older. The planes of his face are smooth and spare, his eyes shadowed by more than the hollowness of his cheeks.

“I’ve told him about you,” Dev says. “The two of you have a lot in common.”

Ronan looks up and I read something like dread in his eyes.

“Ronan is from Ister,” Dev announces, as if he doesn’t notice the crackling silence between us. “Ister lies in the same group as your father’s island, Tay.”

After our evening meal – more riotous than most with the return of the sea-sci team – Lara summarises their findings.

“Fish stocks are building. The toxin tests we ran showed significant reductions – several species came up clear in our preliminary tests, though more detailed work still needs to be done. Our study of migratory paths and habitats isn’t yet complete, but we made progress.” She flicks her short hair from her eyes, her movements swift
and confident. “While the old records proved helpful, it’s clear we can’t rely on them. Too many factors have changed.”

My gaze drifts to Dev. He’s changed into fresh clothes, his hair still damp from the shower. His dark eyes are fixed on Lara – as if he doesn’t already know everything she’s telling us. Beside him Ronan leans back against the wall, chin tucked tight against his chest.

Lara makes no reference to Ronan in her talk, but Vidya’s governors will want to know exactly how he comes to be here. After I told them of Dunnett Island’s policy towards strangers – a policy that offers the exact opposite of welcome – they affirmed their decision to focus Vidya’s energies on the mainland. “We offer smaller groups help when we can,” Marta had told me, “but in this case we don’t believe there’s anything we can do. We’ve sufficient problems of our own to deal with.” I’d needed no convincing. My life was forfeit on Dunnett, for no greater crime than saving a sea-wreck stranger’s life. Dev’s life.

Ronan looks up suddenly and meets my gaze, his eyes dropping before I can decide how to react. I colour, thinking he’ll assume I’m interested in him, which I’m not. I shift my eyes back to Dev.

I’ve seen too little of him since the governors approved a plan to continue the sea research programme. When Dev told me, he assumed that I’d share his enthusiasm. The memory of the year-old argument still pricks like a gorse thorn in my mind. “But why do you have to go?” I’d demanded. “You were lucky to survive the last trip!”

Dev had patted my hand as if I was a child. “And it’s
thanks to you that I did. But don’t you see, Ness, that’s all the more reason why I should join Lara’s team. All our charts and data were lost when
Nemo
sank. I’m the only person with knowledge of where our results proved most promising, as well as where we were when the ship ran into trouble. I only wish I could remember exactly what happened.”

“Seeing as you can’t, I don’t see how you’ll be much use,” I snapped.

“We need this work finished, Ness. There are lives at stake and—”

“Exactly! There were lives at stake before.”

Dev stood abruptly. “I didn’t come seeking your approval, Ness. I came to tell you my plans.”

“You don’t care, then, what I think.”

“It’s not your concern. You’re still a child.”

The memory of his words can still bring a flush to my cheeks. “My age seemed not to trouble you when I was saving your life,” I shot back.

Dev had drawn a deep breath and held it, a muscle jumping in his cheek. “I only meant that you’ll understand when you’re older.” He turned away, each line of his body stiff with disapproval.

“I understand now,” I told his retreating back. “It’s you who doesn’t. You can’t change the past, nor bring people back from the dead, no matter how much you might want to.”

Dev turned in the doorway, mouth tight. “Perhaps that’s something we should both bear in mind,” he said, and was gone.

My anger had bubbled and simmered for more than a week, so that I went out of my way to avoid him. I suspect he did the same. You could say that stubbornness is something we share – we’d neither of us still be here, otherwise.

Esha brokered a peace between us before Dev left on
Explorer
’s first voyage, but part of me thinks he’s never quite forgiven me those words. Maybe I’ve not forgiven him either.

As I watch, Dev turns to speak to Ronan, who shakes his head without looking up. Soon after, Lara finishes her lecture and the room swells with the hum of people discussing possibilities. I don’t join in their talk, at least not till Dev approaches me.

“Good news about the fish stocks,” he begins.

I nod, wishing too late that I’d paid more attention.

“How have you been Ness?” Dev asks across the uncomfortable silence.

“Fine.” I stretch a smile onto my face. “Marta says it’s time I chose my first placement. She thinks I should apply for one of the research programmes.”

“Is that what you want?”

I hesitate. “I’m not sure.”

He glances away around the room.

“Are you back for a while now?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “We’ve a lot of work still to do on migratory patterns and toxin variation between species.”

One of the food-sci techs comes over, armed with questions, and I wish, for a moment, that Dev and I were still trapped in the cave on Dunnett Island. There, though
our lives were at risk, I at least had him to myself.

“As soon as we can,” I hear Dev say. “Lara wants to make the most of the settled weather now the equinoctial storms have passed.”

“You’re not going on another trip? Not when you’re only just back!”

Catching the amusement in the other man’s eyes, I wipe the pleading from my voice. “And what about Ronan? Or were you just planning to abandon him here knowing no one?”

I don’t know why such sharp words spill from my tongue when my insides feel like butter left to melt in the sun.

Dev turns his full attention on me. “I wanted to talk to you about that, Ness. Ronan’s had a hard time. I was hoping you might help him settle.”

I try to swallow the lump that rises like cold porridge in my throat. The tech shrugs and drifts away.

“Of course Esha will help,” Dev continues, “and I will too, while I can, but Lara aims to sail again in ten days.”

“Ten days? But surely you—”

“It’s my research as well as hers. And there are other reasons.” He looks away.

The hall is growing rowdy. I follow Dev’s gaze. Lara is at the centre of a thick knot of people, her hands weaving a path through the air as she speaks. Ronan, beyond, stands tight against the wall, arms wrapped across his chest. Even after two years I sometimes find the press of people in Vidya overwhelming. “There are too many people, Dev. Ronan shouldn’t be here: it’s too soon.”

Dev smiles. “You see, Ness? You understand what he’s going through. Why don’t you come over and –”

“No.” It comes out too harshly. “I’ll meet him properly tomorrow,” I amend, though I’ve no intention of doing so. “Right now he’d be better off somewhere quiet – he’s probably exhausted.”

“True of me too.” Dev sighs. “I don’t know where Lara gets her energy.”

We both study his team leader. She radiates intensity, her whole body animated as she talks. As we watch she tilts her head and laughs, the sound slicing through the room.

Without a word, Dev pushes his way through the crowd. Though it sends small knives of jealousy prickling along my veins, I watch as he leans close to Lara, his mouth nearly brushing her cheek. Smiling, she rests her hand briefly on his arm. I look away.

At one of the tables Kush,
Explorer’
s medic, is sitting with Esha. She tilts her head towards him, ear turned to catch his words. Near the far wall, Anjan is part hidden by a gaggle of girls from our class. She looks up and meets my eyes, only to be swallowed from sight as the others lean giggling across her. When my gaze returns to Lara, Dev has disappeared – Ronan, too, which at least means that Dev might, for once, have followed my advice.

Perversely, I wish that he hadn’t. The buzz of sound around me has begun to make my bones ache, Lara’s brightly polished laugh like the edge of a blade. With the whole community dancing around her, it’s little wonder
she shimmers like a honey bee at the heart of a hive.

I wonder whose idea it was to bring Ronan to Vidya. I know well that the governors excluded visiting the islands from
Explorer
’s brief. Whoever decided it, they’ve no business abandoning him straight away, nor expecting me to take on the problem they’ve made. That Ronan comes from an island near my father’s home, Tay, goes no way at all towards making him my responsibility.

Buttoning tight my emotions, I set my sights on the door and weave a path through the crowd.

In the silence of the room I share with Anjan, my thoughts prove no less turbulent. I pummel my pillow, squishing it into a mound then changing my mind and forcing it flat. An image of Dev’s head bent close to Lara’s rears up in my mind. I push it away, instead remembering Dev as I first saw him, tangled in seaweed and nine-tenths drowned.

If Dev had never been washed up like sea-wreck on the sand of Skellap Bay, I’d not be here now – nor if I’d chosen differently and turned him over to the Council. As a stranger to Dunnett, a potential carrier of contaminants, they’d have put Dev to death. By choosing to save him, I risked sharing that fate – if he hadn’t agreed to bring me with him, I’d have faced it alone.

But if he’d never come at all: if there’d been no research ship, no sinking, no body washed up on the beach below Leewood … I don’t know. Between my Aunt Tilda’s bullying and a forced marriage to Jed, I doubt I’d have
had much chance of happiness on Dunnett. But nor can I say that it’s happiness, exactly, that Vidya has brought me.

“But why?” I stare wide-eyed from Marta to Dev. “I don’t want to leave Vidya,” I tell them. One face shows tolerance, the other exasperation.

“I think you might benefit from some time away,” Marta tells me. Perched on the edge of her desk with her high-boned cheeks and sharp, down-curving nose, Marta looks like a shag waiting to strike. “You have some important decisions to make about your future. A change of scene, of activity, might clarify your focus.”

“I’d have thought you’d enjoy a break at the farms,” Dev says.

I round on him. “And I suppose it has nothing to do with your needing someone to baby-sit Ronan?”

Marta places a hand on my arm. “Ness, if you don’t want to go, I have no intention of insisting. But take some time to think it over.” She gives me a soothing smile. “Now, I’d like to talk to Devdan for a moment, and I know that Esha was looking for you earlier.”

To talk me into agreeing to their plan, I don’t doubt.
Dismissed, I stalk from the room, not bothering to close the door behind me. As their voices curve along the corridor, I wish that I had. “She’s behaving like a five year old,” Dev says. “I don’t understand it.”

“Don’t you?” Marta gives a low laugh. “Well, you should. She misses you, Devdan. Surely you’ve noticed how she idolises you? I thought she’d grow out of it, but—”

I put my hands over my ears and break into a run.

One of the things I dislike about Vidya is its lack of privacy. Stamping out into the filtered light of the courtyard, I dodge a team of scouts – staunch and hard-bitten, their eyes shuttered in the way of people who’ve seen more than they might care to – and duck through the heavy doors that lead to Jago’s archive.

The building’s walls are thick, its air quiet, specially chosen to seal the community’s history from decay. In the past I’ve often come to visit Jago, or to find respite from the bustle of the city. I once suggested to Marta that I might apply for a placement in archives. Her response had been scathing. “You can’t base your future on other people’s choices,” she’d said – and we both knew she was speaking of more than just archives.

Jumping the steps three at a time, I burst through the inner airlock doors, ignoring the archivists who glance up at my precipitate entry. Veering from their frowns into a canyon of shelves, I draw a ragged breath and savour the smell: stories and dust. The only smell I had of books before I came to Vidya was the hot, lost reek of paper burning.

Marta’s overheard words spit like fat on a flame. I trail
my fingers across the cool spines of the binders nestled tight along the shelves, repository of all Vidya’s stories.

Jago once told me that people’s stories are as large as the world and larger, and have room enough for everyone. I’m beginning to think there’s nowhere with room enough for me; that even after two years, I belong in Vidya no more than I belonged on Dunnett. Tears prick behind my eyes.

I press the heels of my palms hard against my cheekbones. The archives feel empty without Jago.

Perhaps my reaction was too hasty. The community’s farms are tucked in a valley to the north of the city and beyond its devastation. I’ve considered, before now, applying to visit. Esha proposed it as soon as she judged me returned to full health, but I told her I’d rather get settled in Vidya. It was Dev, not the city, I was reluctant to leave. Perhaps she understood that too; she raised it again soon after he returned to sea-sci. Even then my resistance was about Dev. I didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing him when
Explorer
made one of her brief stops to report and re-provision.

A hand touches my arm and I jump.

Esha smiles an apology. “Farra told me he saw you come down here. I hope you don’t mind me joining you.”

I shrug a shoulder. She gazes around the basement shelves. “I wonder whether Jago is missing all this.” Her eyes return to mine. “I suspect he might be enjoying the break. We’re none of us good at recognising when we need them.”

“Just because Ronan and I both come from islands,
it doesn’t mean people should assume we have anything in common,” I announce at a tangent, aware that the complaint makes me sound every inch the self-centred child of Dev’s accusation.

“No,” Esha agrees, taking my change of topic in her stride. “But as someone who’s had to adjust to life in Vidya, it’s possible you might understand a little of what he’s feeling.”

It’s true and I know it. I knew it before. I scowl at the dust that curls across a shelf.

“
Explorer
found Ronan and his family adrift in a boat,” Esha says, fixing me with her steady gaze. “He was the only one still alive.”

A chill creeps down my back. “I didn’t know,” I mutter. My reaction to Dev’s request appears petulant thus considered. “They might have told me.”

Esha raises an eyebrow. “I expect Marta feels that it’s Ronan’s decision, who he tells,” she says. “He doesn’t talk easily, especially about himself.”

I can think of nothing to say.

“Marta and I both feel that Ronan might settle more easily at Ebony Hill than in the city,” Esha continues. “And that it might be a useful change for you as well. If you recall, I suggested it when you first arrived in Vidya.” She sighs. “Ness, I do understand that it’s easier to accept the challenges Vidya offers, alongside its benefits, when you’ve grown up knowing nothing else.”

The truth of that makes me pause. Esha doesn’t wait for a response. “Personally, I’m looking forward to a change of air.”

I startle. “You’re going to Ebony Hill?”

“For ten days.” She pauses. “I need some time away, and I’ll be able to check on Jago as well as help Ronan settle in.”

“Have you been to the farms before?” I ask.

She smiles. “I came close to living there once.”

“It’s lucky for Vidya that you didn’t.” My anger has dispersed as fast as it grew. “It’s not that I don’t want to help Ronan,” I tell her, feeling my way through the words. “I just don’t want to be made responsible for him.”

“No one is suggesting that you would be, Ness. The decision to bring him here was made by Lara’s sea-sci team – though they could hardly have made any other in the circumstances. Now that he’s here, he becomes the responsibility of the governors, and specifically of Marta. Her proposal that he spend some time at Ebony Hill doesn’t change that.”

Marta must be in charge of all waifs and sea-strays.

“If Ronan is happy on the farms, he can opt to stay,” Esha adds. “If he isn’t, he can come back.”

“What about me?” I ask. “Do I get to decide whether I stay or come back?”

“Of course. You can return to Vidya with me if you want to.” One eyebrow quirks upwards. “But you never know, Ness: you might find you like Ebony Hill.”

Perhaps that’s what worries me. It’s not only that Vidya has come to feel like home, or that it’s home, as well, to the people on the mainland who are as near as I have to family. Vidya also holds my only tangible connection to Dunnett. I think about my walks to the headland. Ebony
Hill is a long way from the sea, from the last, tenuous link I have with Ty and Sophie.

Esha gives me a moment then places her fingertips gently on my arm. “Ness?”

I toss my head. “Would we stay at Home Farm?” I ask, grasping for the few facts I can recall of Vidya’s satellite settlement.

“At first. We might go up to one of the hill blocks as well – Summertops is the nearest.”

They run sheep and goats on Summertops. Goats are something I know. My eyes trail along Jago’s shelves. “I’ll tell Marta I’ve made a decision,” I say.

Anjan’s tentative voice interrupts my packing. “Ness? I need some help – do you mind?” Her eyes sweep over the meagre pile arrayed on my bed. “It shouldn’t take long. I can’t get the filter in the greenhouse to work properly.”

I’ll likely know no more than she does about a malfunctioning filter, but I follow her anyway. It’s my last evening in Vidya and, though I declined Marta’s proposal for a farewell dinner in the hall, my own company is proving less appealing than I’d like.

There are twelve greenhouses, each as large as a barn, all neatly aligned in a space that was once part of a school. Anjan leads me past the first four then turns in at the next. The interior seems darker than the others. “Is there a problem with the lights as well?” I ask.

A burst of sound greets me. “Surprise!” Esha and Dev spring grinning from behind a tower of seed trays.
I glance at Anjan as two girls from our study-group slip into sight.

“We couldn’t let you leave Vidya without some sort of farewell,” Esha says, her hands clasping mine. “It was Devdan’s idea.”

He holds up his hands. “Guilty. I wanted the chance to say goodbye, even though it won’t be for long.”

“I think you’re lucky,” Anjan says. “I’ve decided I will sign on for Ebony Hill’s seasonal crew. Practical experience on the farms is bound to be useful in research.”

A smile has crept onto my face and stayed there. I glance at Dev, but he and Esha have turned to unpack a cold-crate of supplies.

“I’m sorry I lied, but Esha said I had to keep it a surprise,” Anjan whispers.

“I don’t mind,” I tell her.

Later, when we’ve eaten, Dev comes to stand beside me. “I think you’ve made a good decision, Ness, though I’ll miss you.”

“You’ll be too busy with your research to give me a thought,” I tell him. “You’re hardly ever in Vidya anyway.” The edge of my hurt shows through in my voice.

Dev studies the tiny plants set out in regimented rows before us. “It wasn’t just research I lost when
Nemo
sank, Ness. Our team had been together four years. I’d grown up with two of the crew; we’d chosen to go into sea-sci together.” He hesitates. “Part of me feels responsible.”

“Why? It wasn’t your fault that
Nemo
sank.”

His mouth stretches, lop-sided. “No. But I survived and my friends didn’t. That’s a hard thing to live with.”

His words are true, yet the inference he’s drawn feels all wrong. There’s no blame to attribute. How can there be? It’s not Dev’s fault that the tides washed him up on Dunnett while the sea took the others.

Dev draws a breath, his next words hurrying out on its tide. “I don’t want you to feel I’ve abandoned you, Ness. I could never do that.”

I swallow, unsure how to answer. Esha saves me from trying, handing each of us a glass of syrupy fruit wine. “Here’s to our trip to Ebony Hill,” she says, raising hers high.

“To Ebony Hill,” Dev echoes.

Across the sky beyond the greenhouses, the sun sheds a trail of pink and orange, its gaudy farewell an odd counterpoint to the uneasy tides in my belly. “And to
Explorer’
s next voyage,” I reply, the warmth of Dev’s smile all but suffusing my misgivings.