The Sea Knows My Name Read online

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022

  Copyright © 2022 by Laura Brooke Robson

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525554080

  Photo of girl in sea © TJ Drysdale

  All other images courtesy of Getty Images

  Jacket design by Kaitlin Yang

  Design by Cerise Steel, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One | The Myth of Clementine

  Then and Now and Then

  Chapter One | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Two | Then: Six Years Old

  Chapter Three | Then: Ten Years Old

  Chapter Four | Then: Fourteen Years Old

  Chapter Five | Then: Fourteen Years Old

  Chapter Six | Then: Fifteen Years Old

  Chapter Seven | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Eight | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Part Two | The Myth of Thea

  Then and Now and Then

  Chapter Nine | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Ten | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Eleven | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twelve | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Thirteen | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Fourteen | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Part Three | The Myth of Libera

  Then and Now and Then

  Chapter Fifteen | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Sixteen | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Seventeen | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Eighteen | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Nineteen | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-One | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Two | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Three | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Four | Then: Sixteen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Five | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Part Four | The Myth of Asterope

  Then and Now and Then

  Chapter Twenty-Six | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Seven | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Eight | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Chapter Twenty-Nine | Now: Seventeen Years Old

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For all the girls with stories to tell

  Part One

  The Myth of Clementine

  THEN AND NOW AND THEN

  When my mother was born, her parents named her Clementine, invoking the sweet and unobjectionable, because they forgot that children never live up to their names.

  My grandfather was among the first scholars to study genetics, so he was confident in the biological stuff he passed along to his daughter. His wife—harder to be sure of, but she had no obvious deficits. So: a girl. Clementine. Had she been a boy, I’m told they would’ve named her Rupert, after my grandfather.

  Rupert Morgan, a good man: a hobby taxidermist, an outspoken contributor to all the prestigious Astorian academies, and a stalwart proponent of rationality. His wife, a good woman: quiet.

  As Clementine grew, it became clear to her parents that she was a mean child, especially to her mother. Clementine didn’t have friends, but she did have admirers. My parents met when they were nineteen. My father was studying biology at the university, and he’d heard stories about Professor Rupert Morgan’s clever daughter.

  As the tale goes, my father went to Rupert’s house to plead his case: He wanted to meet Clementine. Not to take on a date, mind you. But to help him with his research.

  Rupert laughed genially and sent him away, but Clementine had overheard. She climbed out her window without a single belonging, shook my father’s hand, and said, “But you’ll be my assistant, yes?”

  It hardly matters, at this point, if that’s what she actually said. It’s part of her myth by now.

  Clementine thought my father’s studies were interesting, and thought he was interesting too. But the most important thing he gave Clementine was an excuse to leave her parents forever. They hadn’t let her enroll in the university; for that, she’d never forgive them.

  In time, Clementine would be legend. Not for her science, as she’d once hoped. People would know her name, and people would fear it. No one would remember the sweet and unobjectionable. They would think pirate and queen and goddess, harpy and bitch and snake. They’d be right, all of them, in time.

  I’ve always thought she started to plan her legacy when my father showed her the Classical myths.

  When Clementine was pregnant, bored, and angry, my father brought her facsimiles of the myths from the university library. She read them, I think, and decided she wouldn’t settle for being mortal. Wouldn’t settle for a story that could be forgotten.

  Her obsession was with Libera and Thea, the twin goddesses. Libera, for whom the sea was named, was the goddess of motherhood. So fruitful were her loins that every other god in the myths had a baby with her. Sometimes, Libera even agreed to it.

  Her sister, Thea, was the goddess of reason. Being the reasonable sort, she stayed a virgin all her life so no one could cloud her judgment. Upon seeing the atrocities of man, Thea descended onto the world with a spear and thrice stabbed—once in each eye, once in the heart—anyone who did not show her respect.

  I was born three weeks premature and silent.

  My mother named me Thea.

  Chapter One

  NOW

  Seventeen years old

  Liberan Sea

  I climb to the main deck of the Pelican at dawn, expecting it to smell better than the sour, sweaty sleeping quarters packed full of snoring men. It doesn’t. It smells like dead whale.

  The whale’s leviathan, half-stripped body towers in my periphery. Oh, Thea, it seems to say, judging. You stupid, stupid girl. What have you done?

  Too much. Not enough. I’m sorry.

  The deck is mostly empty, save the whale’s sad body and mine. Besides us, just a few tired sailors shuffle around the sails, trying to coax movement out of the windless dawn. I wrap my hands around the railing and breathe.

/>   I always thought morning horizons were the best part of sailing—a refreshing, a newness—but today doesn’t feel fresh or new. Clementine would’ve told me that admiring the sunrise was sentimental nonsense, and now I see she’s right. Yesterday, I ran away from Clementine with a boy I never should’ve trusted, and I hoped that in dawn, I’d realize it was all a bad dream. But in dawn, all I see is the endless spill of consequence: The morning horizon can’t save me.

  The sun shakes away the darkness, bayoneting the waves in short-lived colors. Black oil to quicksilver, silver to a urine gold, then the pink-red of diluted wine. In the distance, where an untrained eye would see smudgy nothing, I catch the faintest glimmer of land. I try to be stirred by awe and am not.

  “That’s the greenhand’s girl?” one of the sailors asks behind me.

  “Last captain I sailed with didn’t let any family on his ship,” the other responds loudly. “Said women were bad luck.”

  “She look sort of familiar to you?”

  I turn. The sailors both jolt, just a little, like they’re surprised I didn’t pretend I couldn’t hear them, as any polite woman would know to do.

  “I’m not anybody’s girl,” I say.

  The first sailor says to the second, “She looks kind of like that pirate—you know the one. The woman.”

  “A woman pirate?”

  “Oh, come off it. How many lady pirates are there? The Fowler one.”

  “No. The crazy one? Does Captain know that?”

  I think of that word, crazy, how it would scrape the inside of my dry mouth, how it would lodge there. Crazy. Clementine is volatile, decisive, stoic, exacting, irascible, audacious. Contradictory, impossible to please, and so fiercely disappointed in me that when I ran away from her yesterday, I hoped I’d never need to look back.

  Is she crazy?

  No; she’s just what she has to be in a world full of men like these.

  “I’m her daughter,” I say.

  The sailors blink.

  “What are you doing on our ship?” one of them asks. “She going to come after us now?”

  “Probably not,” I say. Not unless she thinks I’ve been kidnapped; not unless her honor is at stake.

  The sailors seem wary of me now that they know I’m the daughter of the cool, the commanding, the crazy Clementine Fowler. But I don’t deserve their wariness. I feel weak and small and afraid, lost from my mother, on a ship full of men and one very dead whale.

  My heart is beating too fast. I can feel it working away in my chest, ping ping ping ping ping, like the heart of the mouse I found in our kitchen when I was ten, so panicked that I thought its eyes might pop out of its head like lids on boiling kettles. I brought the mouse outside and set it in the grass, and it ran so fast I couldn’t see where it went. Maybe it shot into a fox’s burrow or under a bird’s nest. Any danger, it seemed to think, was better than the one it had just experienced in my hands.

  If someone set me in a field of tall grass right now, I would run so fast no one could see where I went.

  “What’s wrong with her?” one of the sailors is saying, waving a hand too close to my face.

  I flinch. Then bare my teeth. That’s always been the thing separating Clementine and me; for her, the natural reaction is the teeth baring. For me, it’s learned, poorly.

  “I said, how’d you meet the greenhand?”

  My future is so, so narrow. I will no longer be Thea. I won’t even be Clementine’s daughter. I will just be the greenhand’s girl, the unnamed possession of an unnamed whaler.

  Back on the horizon, the ocean glows faint and flickering under that new sun.

  “Where is that?” I ask, ignoring the question, pointing at the smudge of land.

  “Providence,” one sailor says, because of course it’s Providence. “We’re not going there. We’re docking two settlements south, in Fairshore.”

  Providence. There should be mountains rising there, but they’re obscured by fog.

  “How far away?” I ask.

  “Fairshore? We should get there tonight.”

  “No,” I say. “Providence.”

  “Three miles? Why?”

  I consider. I consider the smell: rendering blubber; ash; decay. I consider the whale blood in the water, the sharks that come close when they can taste it. I consider the fact that if I stay here, my eyes might pop out of my head like the lids on boiling kettles.

  I wrap my fingers around the railing.

  Three miles.

  No, I can’t. That’s crazy.

  What would Clementine do? the dead whale asks me. What would Clementine be?

  Volatile, decisive, stoic, exacting, irascible, audacious.

  Crazy.

  “What are you doing?” one of the sailors asks as I unlace my boots. They’re sturdy boots, the kind with good tread that Clementine made all her crew wear. Goodbye, boots. You will be missed. I tug the lace from the left one and use it to tie my hair out of my face.

  My jacket, I shrug off. The only thing I take is the knife from the pocket—Clementine’s knife, pretty but not delicate, carved with her initials, CMF. The gun holster on my hip has been empty since I left Clementine, but I put the knife there now. It’s not a perfect fit, but I button it shut and hope it will do.

  “What,” the sailor says again, louder this time, “are you doing?”

  I just want to move. I just want to run. I just want to be.

  The railing digs into my knees. I clamber to the top of it. It’s slick with water but sticky with salt under my socks, and I sway as I suck in a breath of air.

  There you go, the whale says. One of us should leave this place.

  “Get down from there!” the sailor says, trying to grab my arm, but he’s too late, I’m too fast, I’m too free.

  I dive.

  The water shocks the air from my lungs. Maybe I dove too far. Maybe my body is too heavy, too full of guilt, shame, worry, weakness.

  I need air.

  Salt in my eyes.

  Darkness.

  The crown of my head breaks the surface. Then my mouth is free, my neck and the wet hair plastered to it. Air.

  When I manage to blink away the salt, I see the hull of the Pelican rising from the waves. While I was under, I must’ve kicked or drifted away—I’m twenty feet from it. But even from this distance, when I’m down here, it’s colossal.

  The sailors are shouting something blurry and indistinct. Their faces: stunned. Voices: panicked. I did that to them. I am crazy. What a beautiful thing.

  I laugh.

  “Are you insane?” one of the sailors calls down, cupping his hands around his mouth. “You’re going to drown!”

  “No,” I shout back. “I’m not.”

  What I don’t say—what he doesn’t understand—is that drowning is not high on my list of worries right now. It’s slid down a few dozen spaces and now ranks below a number of more suffocating fears, like my teakettle skull, or Bauer waking up and smiling at me.

  Three miles.

  In front of me, the ocean is open, empty, and depthless.

  If the sailors call after me for a while, they give up soon enough. If they go tell Bauer I’ve gone, I’m not worth pursuit.

  I am seventeen years old. I am a runaway many times over. I am going to swim.

  The water is cold but not too cold. This is the part I try to focus on: the kindness of temperate water. If I focus on this hard enough, I can almost forget that white sharks, which are among the least friendly of the cartilaginous fish, like temperate water too. I can’t see anything. The water feels bottomless, and maybe it is—below me, there’s a film of dusty green, occasionally interrupted by a tangle of kelp or a drifting cloud of jellyfish. Below that, I imagine barrel-headed sperm whales in water like twilight; stilt-legged spiders in water like midnight; an
abyss too black to consider beneath it all.

  I swim.

  When I think of fear, I think of the barnacles that cling to ships. That’s how I imagine my own fear: glued to my skin, visible to all who see me, blemishes to be scraped and carved away. In the ocean, no one can see whether or not I’m afraid. I’ve never been afraid of water, but this water plays tricks with my head. The endlessness of it. Anything too big to hold in your hands is scary—the depth of the sea, the years of a life, the vastness of human emotion. Usually, my fear comes in breathtaking bursts of panic. Here, it’s slow, thudding. I can’t panic for three miles. I can’t let anything take my breath away. Left arm, right arm. Breathe under the crook of my elbow. And then I do it again. Over, over, over again.

  I swim.

  Sailors call the ocean She. She’s rough today. She’ll spit you out in a boat like that. A long time ago, someone named this sea the Liberan, after the goddess of mothers and daughters. Maybe the sea-namers meant it as a comfort. Maybe they meant to imply that these waters would cradle and protect, as mothers are meant to.

  Shivers of silver fish dart in my periphery. Sickle-shaped fins cut the water so near me, I’m glad I can’t see better. When my skin starts to burn, I know I’ve been brushed by another jellyfish. All the while, the waves wash against me, so I breathe on their crests, kick in their troughs, and hope I’m going the right way. There’s nothing to do but keep swimming. If I miss Providence, I’ll die. If I give up before I reach it, I’ll die. If I don’t swim, I’ll die.

  The ocean reminds me, not of most mothers, but of my own.

  I swim.

  I swim until the world beneath me starts to pale with dust and leaves. Until I can smell something other than ocean on the breeze—smoke. Trees. Until my hands are touching kelp, my knees are scraping sand, my cheek is pressed against chipped shells and pebbles of solid earth. Between two fingers, I take a piece of kelp that’s washed up on shore, just like me. It’s still slimy. I hold one of its air bladders, and pop! I’ve seen otters cling to buoyant kelp rafts before, tangling themselves within the forest to keep from floating away into an edgeless sea. Something to keep them safe. Something to keep them still.