Chapter 5 #3
I pull away and she lets go without protest, her hand slowly moving to her side. Her eyes are not on my hand but on my face. And I can’t read her expression. I can’t identify the currents swirling there, but I can say what’s absent: surprise.
“You knew.”
“I guessed,” she corrects me quietly.
She isn’t screaming or running from me—her face is blank, her voice neutral, but surely the shock must be simply delaying her reaction. She has seen the monster I will become. “How long has it been?” she asks.
“Since Mama and Papa died,” I say. “I know how to control it, mostly. If I stay calm and don’t think about them, it doesn’t get worse.”
A half-truth at best. Because it is getting worse, not because of Mama and Papa, but because of August and Silas.
Yet I know with a deep, dark, cold instinct that I shouldn’t tell her about the seashell. The memories—or at least, what Silas claims to be memories—of August plotting to kill me. Because if it’s true that August means me harm, I don’t want to put my sister in his path too.
“That’s why you can’t come on the expedition,” I say, whispering because I don’t trust my voice. “You need to be there for Kit.” Because, in all likelihood, I won’t be.
Her spine goes straight, her eyes steely. “Does that mean you don’t intend to come back?”
“No!” I shake my head quickly. Even if I’m not optimistic about my chances, Lydia can’t think I would ever abandon them of my own free will. “I have a lead on a cure,” I tell her, then immediately regret it when her eyes light up with hope.
“It’s probably nothing at all,” I hasten to add. Even if Silas was telling the truth about Drekja and the possibility of healing, the price he named—dissolving the company, ending whaling—is untenable. “Just … just a possibility.”
“This just makes it more important that we be together,” she says with finality. “I’m coming with you and that’s that.”
I’m prevented from arguing further by Bulkington’s arrival. We exchange the usual pleasantries and then get down to business. Lydia’s taking notes, so cheerful and diligent you would think the last five minutes never happened.
But it’s difficult to sit up straight and feign interest in shipping rates and delivery schedules and the profits we can derive from a dry pound of powdered whaleblood versus in its liquid form.
My eyelids droop, and I’m too hot in my long-sleeved wool dress, and the growing scales itch beneath the fabric.
Worry and sleeplessness drag at my limbs and dull my mind.
To end the interaction faster, I perhaps unwisely agree to raising prices on whale magic at the turn of the season, given the increasing costs of our voyages. I have to press my fingernails into my palms beneath the gloves to stay awake, risking drawing blood.
I’ve arranged another errand after the warehouse, while Lydia is returning to the manor, so we part without discussing further the question of her joining the voyage to Kielstraat. But from the resolute glint in her eyes as she walks out, I have a heavy feeling the matter is resolved.
Myself, I leave Bulkington’s office and climb the stairs, unlock the door to Papa’s old office, and go in.
Or the office that I still think of as Papa’s, even though it was Grandfather’s for a time after my parents died, and now August is mainly the one to use it.
I work from the library at home instead.
For months after my parents’ ship went down, grief and an overwhelming sense of dread kept me from even entering this place.
Dread that I would be inadequate to shoulder the legacy they had left.
It still makes me feel small, stepping inside. I fear that I will be found wanting.
In contrast to the grit and utility of the rest of the warehouse, the office is a stately room, as long as you don’t look out the window to the yard and see the vats to boil blubber, the men breaking giant bones with mallets, the rusty smears over every surface.
Here, there are walls paneled in dark wood, a rich forest-green carpet, a desk with a globe atop it, and more of Papa’s strange, morbid paintings.
Wooden file cabinets line the far walls, each of them labeled with a tag in my father’s neat handwriting.
I find the one notated Fae Encounters, then take it to sit in Papa’s chair.
I don’t know quite what I’m looking for as I page through the files. Maybe just to feel close to Papa—as if by walking the places he walked, touching the objects he once touched, I could hear an echo of his voice and know what I should do.
Inside, the yellowing papers are organized by date, the files getting thicker and thicker each year.
It goes far enough back that the oldest folders are labeled in Grandfather’s more spidery writing, and then Papa’s, for most of the length of the drawer.
But then, six years ago, the writing switches over to Grandfather’s again.
It makes it easy to find the file I’m looking for: 14 V 1836 FC.
The fourteenth day of Fifth Month, six years ago.
The crew who came upon us, who rescued August, Silas, and me, spent hours sifting through the splintered wood and scraps of sail, looking for bodies.
Those still recognizable were collected and brought back to Abbonheim so that their wives and parents and children could put them in decent clothes and wash the salt from their skin.
My father and mother were not among these.
They were knowable only by their possessions—Papa’s red tailcoat, the one that Mama always admonished him for taking on voyages with the whalers, and his favored pistol—with the intricately carved scrimshaw handle—still clamped in his hand.
Mama by her gold wedding ring and pearl-faced pocket watch.
Lucky thing they hadn’t been nibbled away by sharks, that these objects at least could be brought back with me, to sit in the silk-lined graveyard of my top dresser drawer.
Here is the manifest from the Volyar—a copy only; the original is at the bottom of the ocean with the wreckage of the ship.
It feels heavy with grief and things lost. There’s a map here, yellowed with age, setting out our intended route, south through the Barasi, around Cape Silver and Cavoi, and back up into the Sea of the Crossroads.
A new port had opened in Sant Juda that spring.
That was why Mama and Papa had been on the voyage, to meet the merchants there and make connections.
Good business. Such a mundane thing to die for.
The list of the crew, though, is what I can’t tear my eyes from, what I’ve been staring at without processing for fifteen minutes.
More than forty names in alphabetical order.
Second and third mates, harpooners, a cook, a blacksmith, a cooper, and a sailmaker—men and women originating from all parts of the world, many of them just a few years older than me.
Mostly, I can’t remember their faces. Each person, each life summed up in just a few words.
It makes me feel cold. Did any of them have a feeling, stepping aboard the Volyar, that it would be their last voyage?
Except, of course, for three.
Susannah Fairfax, Passenger
Age: 13
Place of Birth: Kirkrell, Abbonheim
Height: 4 feet, 11 inches
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Blonde
Of what Domain Citizen or Subject: Abbonheim
August Hargreave, Apprentice to Lord Fairfax
Age: 15
Place of Birth: Kirkrell, Abbonheim
Height: 5 feet, 6 inches
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Red
Of what Domain citizen or subject: Abbonheim
Silas Price, Greenhand
Age: 14
Place of Birth: Unknown
Height: 5 feet, 5 inches
Eyes: Gray
Hair: Black
Of what Domain Citizen or Subject: Abbonheim
August and I told everyone we met that the finfolk had attacked us. Called down a storm that sank the ship. But no one wanted to believe it at first. Finfolk attacks were a relic of old times, they said. The fae couldn’t sink a ship, not in our age of iron.
Then details started coming out. Papa’s gun was empty of its iron bullets. The barrels of oil and whaleblood and meat that the Volyar had already collected were found bobbing empty, neat round holes carved in their sides, the precious magic inside long since seeped back into the sea.
Silas wouldn’t speak at all for weeks after. So long that the adults who looked after us thought he’d been hit on the head in the wreck, lost his speech. But I knew better. Knew that the finfolk hadn’t harmed him. Wouldn’t harm him.
Sitting there in my father’s chair, I want so badly to hear Papa’s voice in my memory. But instead it’s my own voice, a child’s voice, warped and trembling with rage.
Silas had come to the funeral for Mama and Papa. I hadn’t realized he was there at first. I stayed in the sanctuary long after everyone else filed out, not wanting them to see me cry. I thought I was alone. But when I finally got up, he was there in the backmost pew. Alone too.
“Annie,” he said, voice rasping like that was the first word he had spoken since the Volyar. Maybe it was. “I’m—”
The words came out without my meaning them to, shocking me with their venom, so acidic they practically burned on my tongue:
“You should have died with the rest of them.”
Silas Price looked right through me, face pale and hollow, like his body was in the church with me but his mind was still out at sea. Still drowning.