Chapter 3
The lamplight in the library turns August’s ice-blue eyes dark, the color of the sea on a late spring evening. Reflected candle flames dance in his pupils, and I have to close my own eyes against the intensity of the feeling as he kisses me again. But still my thoughts race.
“What if the shareholders don’t like the Heralder plan?” I murmur against his lips. Bildad’s and Jennings’s skeptical faces float in my memory. “We need their funding to stock the ship. And we’ll need at least fifty sailors, and they’ll expect to be paid double for the risk—”
August’s teeth nip at my lower lip, gentle but unexpected, and a laugh rumbles in his chest at how effectively it silences my words, my head emptying as blood rushes elsewhere.
“Shh,” he whispers, smoothing the pad of his thumb over where his teeth pressed down. “How many hours have we spent planning? You’ve thought of everything, down to every last crumb of hardtack.”
“They’ll be afraid,” I whisper around the heat flaring in my chest.
“They surely will,” August says readily, voice low and melodic.
I can feel the vibration of his chest when he speaks.
“But you can count on whalers’ ambition outweighing their fear.
Or their greed, if you like.” His breath on the shell of my ear makes me shiver, wrenches free what I really mean to say.
“I’ll miss you.” My voice trembles.
He draws back a fraction and, like he does every time we’re alone, reaches down to peel my gloves off, somehow deft enough to not damage the silk. Cool air rushes over my hands and I shiver with the familiar combination of pleasure and fear.
Three times August Hargreave has saved my life.
The first was the night the Volyar sank.
The worst finfolk attack in a hundred years, but we wouldn’t know that until later when the bodies were counted.
Everything was darkness and chaos and terror.
Yet August, only fifteen, had the courage—or maybe foolishness—not to push me off our lifeboat as sobs wrenched out of me and we watched the scales bloom in the cold starlight.
I keep my eyes on his face now, not wanting to look at my hands, the small gray-green scales creeping up over the backs of them, my long and sharp and twisted nails. “I don’t know how you can bear seeing them,” I whisper, shame seeping through the desire lighting me up inside. “Seeing me.”
The second time he saved my life was in the days and weeks after we were rescued.
When a physician came to examine us, he convinced the woman we were fine, we didn’t need to be checked over.
Then the endless rounds of questioning back in Kirkrell.
He could have turned me in at any moment, he should have, but he never did.
His eyes are bright, almost greedy as he takes me in.
All of me. “I like touching your bare skin,” he says, weaving his fingers through mine and pressing both my hands up against the wall behind me, where I can’t see them but he can.
“I like knowing something about you no one else knows … well, almost no one.”
When I fell in love with him, even though I knew it was impossible, the force of feeling almost seemed to chase the curse away.
So the third time wasn’t really one time at all, but a thousand small rescues over the years as gratitude turned into friendship, then love.
The scales, the claws didn’t go away, but they were slow to return, easy to pluck away and file down.
I allowed myself to forget Papa’s warning about letting anyone too close. I dared to hope for the impossible, that love could mend my heart. And for a while, it seemed to—if not cure the curse, at least stop its progress.
Then the shell arrived, seeping malevolence in the back of my mind. When the right moment comes … But I’m alive because of August. How can I now doubt him? What right do I have to doubt him?
He leans down and the tip of his tongue touches the bow of my lips again.
Lightly, a request, but it chases away my fears.
I open my mouth and let him in. An invitation he takes greedily, tilting my head back for easier access.
He tastes like apple wine, and I can feel his pulse in his fingers, just as fast as my own.
He lets go of my hands and his fingers slip around the back of my skull, pushing through the weave of the braid that Lydia constructed so carefully earlier, and the tugging sensation sends lightning down my spine.
“Don’t mess up my hair,” I gasp, a half-hearted protest as I slip my hands around his waist, careful not to let my nails snag on his coat. “People will notice.”
“No one will notice.” His hand on the small of my back presses me against him, the solid planes of his body, and I want—I want—I want to give over to it and let it sweep me away.
But I can’t touch him like he’s touching me, not without tearing his skin. And there’s the doubt I have no right to feel creeping back in. There will be a storm—
No, I tell myself. It’s a trick, a lie.
I pull back from the kiss. My skin feels alive, alert to every touch; my body wants more but my mind chastises me to be careful, to guard my tattered heart—whatever’s left of it. “We should get back to the meeting,” I say, throwing on a rueful smile.
He gathers my hands up between us. I shiver as the pads of his fingers brush over the scales, my palms, my knuckles and nails.
“It’s getting worse,” he remarks quietly, turning my hands over in his like he’s checking them for flaws. “The heartbreak. Why is that, do you think?”
I blink, trying to clear the fog in my head as the desire slowly drains from me, leaving the ever-present dread and emptiness in its place.
“I forgot to pluck the scales out this week,” I say, tongue heavy and voice sounding unconvincing even to myself.
A year ago, I could get away with plucking them once a week.
Lately it’s once a day. More on bad days.
His blue eyes probe mine, face growing serious, and I wonder if he believes me, what he would say if he knew how bad it’s gotten. A heartbroken heiress, a legacy of generations one weak link away from tumbling down. What if he asks me to tell him the truth?
I think I would. I think I would do anything he asked. And that frightens me even more.
A knock on the door makes us both startle, alarm shooting through me. August steps back from me and I grab my gloves off the nearby shelf, tugging them on as fast as I can without tearing the silk.
Another knock, more insistent this time. Out of the frying pan, Mama would say; I’ve escaped having to explain myself to August, but now we have to go out and face the shareholders.
August lights another lantern, rendering the scene slightly more respectable, like maybe we really have been merely discussing business in here.
Aside from the faint smudge of color still high in his cheeks, he is collected, master of himself.
I’m sure the same isn’t true for me. I’m still breathing hard, running a hand over my braid to make sure it lies flat, when he opens the door.
“Silas.”
My view of the other side of the threshold is blocked by the door, but that name makes ice crystals form in my still-molten blood. I straighten my spine as August steps back to let him come inside.
I want to protest that he has no business in my father’s library.
Sure, he might be a ship captain at age nineteen.
But Silas’s ship, the Whistler, is the oldest and smallest in the Fairfax Company’s fleet, and its task is not to hunt whales.
Rather, it is to find whales that have already died, to haul them in and hack them apart and separate the salable flesh from the rotting.
And secondly to report to the sites of storms and shipwrecks, pick up any survivors as well as any barrels of whale oil or meat or bone that might have been preserved.
An assignment given only to those clinging by their fingertips to scraps of respectability: a salvager. A scavenger.
An enraging smirk curls around the corners of Silas’s mouth as he takes August and me in, half in and half out of the library with the door propped open on his shoulder.
His eyes flicker over my hair, my bruised-feeling mouth, down to my gloved hands.
Heated shame rushes into me, but I push it down.
This is my home, and August is my fiancé. I can do what I will here, with him. Silas is the one who has no right to be here.
I lift my chin and glare at him as imperiously as I can. “What do you want?”
He doesn’t appear stung by my harsh tone; instead he greets me with a slight incline of his head, the respectful title he addresses me with laced with subtle scorn. “Lady Fairfax. I was invited.”
“By—”
“By me,” August cuts in, his hand finding my arm. “My apologies for not mentioning it sooner.” But he doesn’t sound apologetic.
Anger makes my fingers twitch toward fists; I have to remind myself to keep them still, to remain collected. I don’t want to let Silas see there’s anything less than perfect accord between August and me, ever. But for a moment, my anger at them both flares equally bright.
“Well, look at us,” I say. “The miracle children of the Volyar together again.”
I want to put them off-balance, and it works.
August blinks, surprised, and Silas’s sardonic expression crystallizes into a cold glare.
I let myself smile. August and Silas, different as they are, both move through the world with such sure-footedness.
I envy that, I covet it. Yet I’m not a creature to be laughed at or pitied.
“A good portent,” August declares after a long moment, glancing from Silas to me like he can see the current of rage and resentment in the air. He captures my hand in his. “Of unity and good fortune for our next ventures.”