Finder's Shore by Anna Mackenzie Page B

Farra’s decision that Ronan should come with me. “If anyone questions us, we can tell them I was the stranger Ness found,” Ronan had argued, “and that she helped me because I was from her father’s island. That way there’s no need to bring Vidya into it at all.”
    “It could work.” Farra had discounted Dev’s objection that Ronan looked nothing like him. “Only Ty and Sophie saw you up close, Devdan, and they won’t give Ness away. With the island connection, her actions would seem more misguided than traitorous.”
    “Jed saw me too,” Dev had pointed out.
    “Inside the cave, at night,” Ronan had answered. Now that he’s found his voice, he can be almost too convincing.
    “It’s irrelevant because they won’t get caught,” Lara had countered. “Ness makes contact with her family, finds out where things stand, then we pick the pair of them up as agreed.”
    As I watch Ronan eat, I let myself look square at the reality of all the things that could go wrong: the timing, the weather, our landing and departure. What if I can’t find Ty or Sophie? What if we’re discovered — will Ronan’s story hold? Would even Marn believe it? Thinking of Colm Brewster’s hard eyes, I doubt it. And even if I do find my family, what then? Will they be happy to see me, or will they have given me up for dead long since, and be content, as well, to leave it that way?
    “There are too many risks,” Dev had announced, when we were working out the plan.
    “There are always risks. It’s the way life is.” Lara’s brusque tone had earned a scowl from Dev, but half an hour later, as they stowed a sail, they had nothing but smiles running between them.
    Lara puts her head through the galley door. “I’ve taken us as close as we can risk in the dark,” she says. “Are you ready?”
    Ronan and I follow her out. At the ship’s rail I hesitate. “The weather should hold,” Lara says, “but if it clags in before dark, get off-shore straight away. We’ll be waiting.”
    Our gear is already stowed. Dev steadies the ladder as I clamber down to the dinghy. We’d debated taking the larger surfboat, but I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get it into the cave. “The dinghy is more manageable,” Lara confirmed. “And it isn’t as if speed is a factor.”
    As I settle within it, it seems a frail thing set against the expanse of ocean around us. My heart begins a slow hammering.
    “You’ve got the flares?” Dev asks, leaning from the deck above. “Any problems, Ness, you use them.” I force my face into a smile. The dinghy rocks as Ronan steps off the ladder. My hands grip the gunwales.
    “Ready?” Farra calls. The quarter of moon slides free of cloud, silvering his face and the surface of the sea.
    I nod, coiling the rope as he casts us off. Spray flicks across me in a cold baptism as Ronan manoeuvres the oars. When I turn to look back, Explorer is already dropping behind, the figures at the rail barely distinguishable. Wind tugs at my hair as we slide through the moon-burnished water. Somewhere ahead lies the island where I was born. Eagerness lifts like a wave as I search the night for my first sight in three years of the bird’s-wing curve of Skellap Bay.
     
    The dark feels thick as treacle as Ronan pulls us cautiously forward. Cloud has stolen the moonlight, but the crash of waves on rock and the smell — of beached kelp and drying salt — warn us of the island’s shore.
    “Veer a little to your right,” I advise, my voice pitched just above the slap of waves.
    Cold droplets scatter across us as we meet a swell side-on . The cloud severs abruptly, unveiling the looming mass of the headland and, tucked beyond, the pale slash of the bay. “There!” I say, excitement coiling in my chest. My eyes latch onto the glimmering curve of sand, its tangled line of flotsam a dark husk across it. I hunt for the path that leads up from the shore, but the cloud closes again, shuttering my vision. “Farther