Chapter 4
Somehow, I manage to slip from the scene of merriment and self-congratulations that erupts in the parlor following August’s speech.
As soon as I get my bedroom door shut behind me, I stumble to my vanity and collapse on the stool.
It’s blessedly quiet up here, and dark. Kit’s door is closed; hopefully he’s sound asleep.
My fingers itch and burn inside their gloves, feeling like they’re on fire. I scrabble to take them off, and the silk snags on my long, jagged reddish-black fingernails. The gloves fall to the floor, shortly to join the pile of other destroyed gloves piling up at the back of my wardrobe.
New scales march up my wrists, a pale, muddy greenish-gray against my irritated red skin; but I don’t let myself look for longer than a second, afraid I’ll see new ones sprouting up before my eyes.
I can almost feel them stiffening, trying to break through my skin.
My hands are shaking, my nails scratching the polished wood of my dresser as I yank open the top drawer.
Among the paints and creams and jewelry there’s a corked glass vial the length of my hand, a quarter inch of rust-colored powder along the bottom.
I take it out and uncork it, careful not to spill the powder even with my shaking hands and tear-blurred vision.
Add a little water from the pitcher on my dresser; press my thumb over the opening and shake until a thick, muddy liquid coats the inside of the glass.
I lick the pad of my thumb, grimacing. I can’t let any of the precious, healing whaleblood go to waste—it’s the only thing slowing my transformation into a monster.
Then I tip my head back with the vial to my lips.
The taste of iron and salt floods my mouth.
I force myself to swallow, letting the tepid liquid run over my tongue until the flow stops.
Stowing the vial in my pocket while suppressing the urge to gag, I lift my hand into a watery beam of moonlight through the window and watch the dark, mottled color of my nails fade to pink, their sharp ends receding.
But even as the soreness and itching fades, some compulsion makes me take out the shell again from its hiding place in my drawer.
When my fingers touch its sharp edges, it shows me memories that are not mine.
The scene is blurred, the edges of things soft, but here is August, sitting in Papa’s library, in Papa’s chair.
His boots are propped up on the desk, something he would never do around me.
The suspended Livyatan skull hangs above his head like a crown or the watchful presence of some ancient god.
Its empty eye sockets stare down at me, cold and accusing.
When he speaks, his voice sounds different from usual. Colder, harder, more matter-of-fact, without the softness he uses with me. Echoing, like the sound is reaching me from the other end of a long tunnel. But there is still the feeling of sharing a secret as he leans forward over steepled hands.
We will sail the Heralder to Kielstraat. She will be with us. I’ll wait for a particularly pretty sunset or a spectacular kill and then my feelings will overcome me. I’ll drop to my knees, tell her I can’t wait any longer. We’ll marry at sea.
And then at some point, there will be a storm. There always is. When the right moment comes, I’ll … I’ll do what must be done. People die on ships all the time. As you know.
No one will challenge me. The shareholders prefer me. She doesn’t have the vision, never has, and especially not for these times.
Not for what’s coming.
The shell arrived a month ago—carried in by Declan with the rest of the post, wrapped in clean rags in an innocuous white paper box addressed to me.
I opened it and was met with this strange nightmare, one that threatens to push me off the ledge I’ve been balancing on for six years. To break my heart entirely.
Before, I had almost convinced myself that even heartbroken, even cursed, I was stronger than Cousin Mary.
I knew it couldn’t be stopped or reversed, but with August to comfort me, and whaleblood to heal my hands after I plucked out the scales and filed down the claws, I thought I could slow it down.
Enough, at least, to last until my siblings were grown up. To know that they would be all right.
But since I first held the shell and heard and saw August plotting to kill me—even if it’s not real, can’t be real—the heartbreak curse has advanced faster and faster.
A strangled sob escapes me as I look at myself in the mirror, the moonlight making me pale as a ghost, my tears smearing makeup around my eyes and making them look like a skull’s hollows.
We’ll marry at sea. There will be a storm. I’ll do what must be done.
“It’s a lie,” I tell myself, whispering the words out loud as if that will make them more convincing. “A trick, dark magic.”
The shell holds a lie. I have no other choice but to believe that, because if I let myself believe that August means me harm, my heart will break entirely.
But it was easier to convince myself before he announced that I would go north too on the Heralder.
The door of my bedroom opens behind me, making me jump. I scrabble to drop the shell in the drawer, not wanting Lydia to see me staring at it—or, worse, August. But when I look up to the mirror, it’s not Lydia’s reflection in the doorway, or August’s.
It’s Silas Price.
“Do you believe me now?” he asks, low voice cutting through the room, all the air seeming to drain away.
Even as I scramble to my feet, slamming the drawer shut with the seashell inside, grief pierces me that my sister and my betrothed didn’t come after me.
Not that I want them to see me like this, tears streaking my face, my throat raw from the sobs I’ve been holding in.
But not in years have I felt so alone as I do now.
“You can’t be here,” I hiss. “This is my family’s private space.” I realize too late that the gloves are still on the floor, my fingers bare. It’s dark, but still I fist my hands in my skirts, wanting to hide them, even if it’s pointless.
“For weeks I’ve been asking for an audience, Lady Fairfax.
” He keeps his distance, a rigid shape outlined by moonlight in the doorway.
I don’t doubt that he dislikes me as much as I do him.
Our mutual distaste tethers us together like a rope straining between two vessels, always on the verge of breaking and taking someone’s limbs off. “You’ve ignored every note.”
“Because I have nothing to say to you.”
“Don’t you?” Silas’s eyes fall to the dresser, the drawer that hides the shell still cracked open. “Because it seems you saw my message. He means to get rid of you on the way to Kielstraat.”
I’m not surprised to hear him admit he sent the shell. I suspected as much. But it still makes every hair on my body rise with fury. “I saw a parlor trick,” I say, cold as I can. “A fantasy.”
“If you really believe that,” he says, “why is your heartbreak getting worse?”
Fear spikes through me. Is it so obvious?
If Silas has discerned that much, can others see it as well?
I can still hear the sounds of the shareholders drinking and laughing, the gathering going on in my absence.
And Kit’s room is right across the hall.
If he stayed up late reading, if he’s awake to hear this—
“Come in, then, if you must,” I say, voice shaking. “Shut the door.”
There is a monster that sleeps coiled under my skin, a monster that hatched in the hours after my parents’ deaths, when I floated in dark waters amid the wreckage of the Volyar, when the heartbreak curse first took hold.
But for a long time, it was small, manageable, manifesting only as fleeting thoughts and impulses—an urge to take a swing at a drunkard catcalling me on the street, or when I cut myself chopping vegetables, to lick up the blood and learn what it tastes like.
But lately, seeing vulnerability in others wakes it up, as with Mayor Bildad earlier and the scab on his neck where he must have nicked himself shaving.
Anger wakes it up too, and it ripples under my skin as Silas Price does as I ask, then leans against the back of the door, crossing his arms with enraging casualness.
“Why would August want to kill me?” I challenge him, seething inside. Without taking my eyes off him, I find a candle and a match, strike a flame with shaking hands. “He saved me. He saved both of us.”
Because of course it wasn’t just me and August on the lifeboat that terrible night. We were three.
Me, senseless with terror and grief as heartbreak set in.
Quick-thinking August, pulling me onto the boat. Holding me there even as I struggled, the new claws tearing his skin.
And Silas, silent and unreadable as the eerily calm water under our lifeboat as our crew drowned around us.
“We were children then.” Silas is watching me carefully, like one would a wild animal. “Now control of the Fairfax Whaling Company is in his grasp. Lots can change in six years.”
His calm, detached demeanor infuriates me.
“Yes, it certainly seems so.” I don’t sit down.
I want to stay at eye level with him. “For instance, you used to always be alone, and now your little collection of unfortunates follows you everywhere. Is it out of guilt you’ve taken them in?
Or because no one else wants you around? ”
It’s the height of foolishness to antagonize a boy who could ruin me, but still something in me thrills when Silas’s face darkens into a glare. Maybe if I make him angry, I’ll tip his hand, learn his real game.
“Hate me all you like, but my crew are better people than you or I will ever be,” he says in a voice like distant thunder. “And I’ve found a way to lift their curses.”