Chapter 6 #3
It climbs the slope of the floor, flowing around Silas where he kneels, creeping around my own feet.
The air takes on a charged feel. Mist kisses my face and wets my clothes, too heavy and cold and sudden to be natural, and electricity lifts the ends of my hair.
Silas stands up, glowing water dripping from his fingertips.
He’s just a tangle-haired boy with chapped, bitten lips and wide earnest eyes.
Yet as I stare at him in the unnatural green light of the pool, it sinks in like it never quite has before that he is not human.
Not fully. The fog swirling around my knees whispers his true nature; the wind tugs at my clothes even though we’re deep underground.
Even the ice wall is rebuilding itself of its own accord, strands of water climbing over one another toward the top of the door frame and then freezing, branching over with frost.
The sight of the ice blocking my way out fills me with a sudden, wild panic. It’s like falling into freezing water, the realization that I’m down here alone with someone who has his own agenda and magic I can’t begin to understand.
“Stop this,” I command, cold and authoritative as I can, aware that the gap of the doorway is shrinking. I unclench my fists and start a silent countdown. Three. “Stop it now.”
“Please, Annie.” His voice comes out low, almost desperate, like he needs me and not the other way around.
Two. I tense my muscles.
“There’s a way out,” he goes on, words coming faster. One. “Let me show you.”
I raise my hands and launch myself at him.
I have never attacked anyone in my life—even when I bickered with Lydia as a child, we traded insults, not blows.
So I wonder if it’s the curse in my blood steering me, sending me surging forward.
That’s the last lucid thought in my head before something else takes over.
The something I saw in Cousin Mary’s eyes through the bars all those years ago.
A red haze, a hunger for screams and the smell of iron and flesh parting beneath my nails.
It’s so loud in my head, so all-encompassing, but the other voice—soft but strong, it sounds like my sister—still cuts through.
No.
This isn’t you. Not yet.
I gasp, awareness flooding back into me slowly.
First my hearing—I can hear my own ragged breathing, but someone else’s too, harsh and fast and scared.
Then sight. Wide gray eyes, a halo of iridescent green.
Then touch. A body trembling under mine.
His chest under my knee. His throat under my fingers, his hands wrapped loosely around my wrists.
I’ve pinned Silas down by the edge of the pool, his head hanging over the ledge.
The ends of his hair trail in the water, sparking enough green glow to illuminate my right hand wrapped around his neck, nails digging into the sides, my left hand holding my knife to his throat.
Both the nails and the blade draw trickles of blood that look black in the strange light, and dark veins creep out from the place where the blade nicks his skin.
His pulse hammers beneath my fingers, throat bobbing as he swallows, and his breath is rapid as he stares up at me, shivering. He’s afraid, and the monster under my skin revels in that. It fills my head with images of pushing his head underwater or dragging my nails across his throat.
It’s not me, I think desperately. The monster might be lurking inside me, the curse growing stronger in my blood, but it is not me, not yet. I don’t want to revel in his pain and fear, even if he’s finfolk. I don’t want his death on my hands.
His throat moves under my hands. I blink and realize that he’s smiling. Faintly, and clearly still afraid, but smiling. “So much for not dangerous.”
I’d been considering letting him go, but his mockery makes me want to tighten my grip. “Only to liars and devils.”
“Strong words for someone who needs my help.”
Blood streaks down my fingers, drips into the pool, each drop sparking a flare of green, and the monster wants more. “I don’t need anything from you,” I growl.
“Go back to your manor then, and let heartbreak take you.” Pain roughens his words, but they’re still clear, each syllable distinct. “Or give in to it now and tear me open. As you like.” A ragged breath. “But I’m your best chance to lift the curse, Lady Fairfax, and you know it.”
A wave of disgust both for him and for myself breaks over me. I let go and roll off him, sheathing my knife and scuttling backward as he sits up slowly, wiping the blood from himself with a sleeve pulled over his hand. “Touch the water,” he says.
“What?”
“Look—” Before I can draw back, he catches my wrist—fingers closing warm over the scales—and tugs our hands down toward the surface of the water.
The vision comes suddenly, in the way lightning in the sky at night for an instant paints the world silver, brighter and stranger than day. Leaning over the side of a boat, gray water beneath me. A massive shape in the water, rumbling as it rolls, a giant eye blinking at me out of the dim.
A small, dark space with walls of weathered wood.
A kneeling figure with eyes that are jade green from corner to corner, no iris, no pupil.
If I had form, I’d scream, but I’m nothing but fog, nothing but smoke, swept on a fierce wind to somewhere else.
I see a body in whaler’s clothes sprawled on a ship deck at night, face down, body contorted.
I see a spiral seashell, its spines stained red with still-wet blood.
Other images flash by, there and gone as quick as a blink.
An upside-down map of the world. The whale skull in Papa’s library, smashing against his desk.
A cave big enough to fit a castle. The wharf at Kirkrell burning.
A room with ceiling, walls, floor all carved of glittering crystal.
An undulating shape moving just below the sea’s surface.
Then everything goes dark again, but for the green light leaking in around the edges of my eyelids. I come back to my body slowly, awareness returning of my breath; the fog; Silas, sitting a yard away, watching me intently. The images stay sharp in my mind, like they’ve been burned into me.
“What do they mean?” I ask Silas quietly, frightened enough by the visions that I momentarily forget to hate him. “Is that—was that the future?”
“More like possibilities,” he says cryptically.
“Things that could be. Not necessarily what will be. They don’t have to mean anything.
” He reaches down and plucks something floating on the surface of the water.
A flat whitish oval about as long as my pinky finger.
He holds it out toward me, luminescent water dripping as he places it on my palm, the tips of his fingers just brushing my skin.
My breath catches as I hold my flattened hand up to look closer, realizing it’s a stone—or bone?
—like the ones the Cursed Crew wear upstairs.
It’s smooth, heavy, the yellow-white of what looks like whalebone, with holes worn through at the edges.
Not something that by rights should float.
But I can feel the magic in it, seeping down through my fingers.
Sparkling pinpricks of static that make me think of fog and dark waves.
“Put this on a chain and carry this with you,” he says as I close my hand around it. “Whenever you have an opportunity to do a favor for the finfolk—anything you think they’d appreciate—put a drop of blood on its surface. That will earn you their blessing.”
“Blood?” I echo. “What kind of blood?”
“Cuttlefish blood,” he snaps. “What do you think? Your blood.”
I suppose I can’t begrudge him being surly after nearly dying at my hands. I slip the stone into my breast pocket and it sits warm over my heart. “How will I know when I’ve done enough favors to be healed?”
“You don’t; that’s the beauty of it.” Silas gets up gingerly and brushes himself off, but there’ll be no saving his shirt; a fresh red stain seeps down the collar.
“From what I can tell from the stories, you just have to approach the queen with the pendant when you feel you’ve done enough, when you feel worthy. And hope for the best.”
He holds his hand out in what feels like a peace offering, or at least a truce.
I wait for my anger to surface, but it doesn’t appear.
My mind and heart feel crowded and heavy with everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve seen here.
Maybe there’s no room for anger right now.
I put my gloves back on before taking his hand and letting him help me to my feet.
There’s a beat of strained silence that I try to break by fishing in my coat pocket for a vial of whaleblood—I carry one everywhere I go. I hold it out to Silas. “For your neck?” Truce or no truce, that’s the closest thing I’ll give him to an apology.
He grimaces, seems to waver, but in the end accepts the vial. “Trying to get an early start on the favors?”
I try not to stare at his throat bobbing as he drinks the whaleblood, at the small gouges my claws left closing up, the blood flaking away.
His words dislodge my thoughts and I try it, pricking my thumb with my knife and letting the bead of blood fall on the pendant’s surface. It rolls off and plinks to the ground.
I blink. “What’s meant to happen?”
“Not that.” Silas shrugs. “Sorry.”
I try not to feel disappointed. Probably it doesn’t count as a favor to heal a wound I inflicted. “Maybe if I bring you a cup of coffee every so often on the voyage?”
His lips—traces of red whaleblood clinging to them—twitch upward as he caps the now-empty vial and hands it back to me. “Could be worth a try. But that won’t be enough to win the queen’s favor.”
Climbing the stairs back up to the tavern, I ask: “What makes you think I can even end whaling?” Bitterness tinges my voice. “The shareholders don’t respect me.”
“Maybe not, but you don’t have to convince them,” he replies without turning around. “You are your father’s daughter. The company is yours. Give an order and they’ll be honor bound to obey. Will you try?”
Just like Lydia, he sees things as more simple than they truly are.
Silas may think the company belongs to me, but it’s the other way around.
I belong to the company. I belong to the legacy built by my father and grandfather and all the Fairfaxes before them, stretching past memory into myth.
I will not be the one to let it crumble. I cannot.
But I can’t protect the company—or, more important, my brother and sister—if I’m heartbroken.
I almost killed Silas tonight with my bare hands.
I can no longer convince myself that I’ll somehow manage to escape the curse when no one else ever has.
Sooner or later I’ll die, or turn into something unrecognizable.
Yet if it’s true that I can be healed, if the visions from the water mean something, I can have my life back. All Silas needs is my word. And once I’m healed, he will have no power over me. All I have to do is say:
“Yes.”