Chapter 7
On Seventh Day morning, the cursed always start gathering at the church before sunrise.
By the time I get there at eight bells, an hour before services, the sky is pearly gray and a dozen people huddle around the edges of the square of green grass that the Sailor’s Bethel presides over.
The entrance to the churchyard is fashioned from a Livyatan jawbone, twelve feet tall, stripped of its teeth and polished smooth and inscribed with scripture verses.
It stands against the gray morning like a sentry, casting a long shadow over the cursed.
Kit and Lydia will come later, in time for the nine-bells service, but I like arriving early, helping in this small way, how quiet and peaceful it feels without the town’s eyes on me.
And though I feel guilty being away from Kit with so little time left until the Heralder sets sail, it’s nice to get a break from Lydia’s questions too.
Since I told her about the heartbreak and going to Drekja for a possible cure, they’ve been nonstop, the partial truths I’ve been giving not satisfying her.
Now that she’s apparently going on the voyage as well, she’s already started making arrangements, ordering new sailors’ clothes and a crate of her favorite coffee to be packed in the hold.
She knows Silas has promised to help me, but I don’t want her to know about the promise he extracted in return, or the fact that I don’t intend to keep that promise.
We’ll both be living in close quarters with Silas for months—and August, and Mance, and so many others—and I don’t want to burden her with my secrets, nor worry about her accidentally spilling them.
The eyes of the cursed follow me as I stride toward the church entrance.
Hiding my affliction under neatly pressed clothes and an erect bearing, I walk toward the archway with my back straight and head held high, greeting the others as I pass.
There’s nothing in our scriptures about finfolk curses, nothing to say that their victims can’t tread on holy ground.
But sometime in the centuries since whalers came to Kirkrell, it seems to have been established as a rule.
None of the cursed set so much as a toe onto the church grass.
None but me.
Some of the faces are familiar: the old man who can only speak in a series of clicks that no one has ever been able to decipher; a woman whose eyes are red and swollen always because, she says, her tears are seawater.
Today there’s a man I haven’t seen before, huddled a few yards off from the entrance, staring fiercely up at the steeple.
He’s middle-aged, with a craggy face but no visible ailments, and I wonder what his curse might be.
I know all too well not all the finfolk’s vengeful punishments are visible to the outside world.
The clicking man returns my greeting with a nod, but the others don’t acknowledge me, their gazes fixed instead on the church, lips moving in silent prayers and pleas.
I suppress a shudder as I pass through the archway, walk up the path, slip through the wooden doors.
It’s not lost on me that however the people outside got their curses, whatever they did to incur the wrath of the finfolk, they likely did it in service to the Fairfax Whaling Company.
Papa said it was good for the people of Kirkrell to see us at church, handing out battered leather hymnals or brewing coffee or lighting candles. But I think he wanted me to see them too, and remember that our business is not without cost.
He always said we were here to serve the people of Abbonheim, not the other way around. Heal them, protect them, make them strong. And I’ve kept up the tradition since my parents died, even as I suspect it’s a kind of blasphemy for me to set foot inside.
In the vestibule off to the side of the sanctuary, the scent of strong brewed coffee enriches the cool, dusty air.
Harriet Prescott, a round middle-aged woman with a brisk manner, bustles about, stacking hymnals and donation baskets along a side table for the service.
“Lady Fairfax! How long now until your journey?” She smiles warmly at me.
I force a smile as I hang my jacket on a hook on the wall.
“Three days.” The voyage to Kielstraat has been the talk of the town this past week, everyone buzzing with excitement over the prosperity the expedition will surely bring.
All of it has an undercurrent of desperation.
With the declining whale numbers, people are looking to August’s plan for the arctic port as a last hope.
Once, that would have made me glow with pride, that my beloved was going to save the company and the city.
But now my heart is heavy with doubt, suspicion, resentment.
If he truly means to kill me and take over the company, what better time to do it than now?
The people of Kirkrell don’t love me as they loved my father.
If August ushers in a new era of prosperity and I disappear somewhere along the way, I can’t imagine anyone will look too closely at the how.
“I’ll surely miss having your help here when you’re on your grand adventure,” Harriet is saying. “But don’t stray from the right path when you’re at sea.” She pulls a face. “Drinking, carousing. I’m not sure a whaling ship is any place for a young lady.”
If only she knew how very far I plan to stray.
I suspect that consorting with finfolk, making bargains with them, and wearing their enchanted pendants are all far worse in the Maker’s eyes than drinking and carousing.
“I’ll behave,” I say anyway. “Say some extra prayers here for our smooth sailing.”
A few minutes later, I let myself into the sanctuary, holding a lit candle to light the others that line the aisle.
Dim and empty, the sanctuary is as spare as the church’s outside.
Papa used to show me drawings from his travel sketchbook of ornate temples and towering cathedrals he’d seen.
Not for whaling people, these. The Sailor’s Bethel is a stark, simple building, whitewashed wood walls broken up by stripes of dark stained glass, a stone floor worn smooth by age, pews unadorned with cushions.
The most striking feature are the grave plates—plaques of iron and copper and silver of all different sizes nailed to the walls beneath the stained glass, engraved with hundreds of names and messages.
In memory of Hugh Tilley. He loved the sea and will now rest in its arms for ever.
In memory of Koto, lost to a Livyatan’s wrath on 21 VIII 1796, along with the rest of his crew on the good ship the Commerce.
In memory of our beloved Philip Clement. The finfolk have taken you from us but we know you live in glory above.
They stretch across the whole walls of the church on both sides.
More than a hundred years they encompass, and the letters on some of the oldest ones in the front have worn smooth from decades and decades of existence.
Familiar as an old song, they glitter in the light of the new flames as I move up the aisle, carefully tipping my candle against each unlit wick.
Harriet’s words echo in my head. Don’t stray from the right path when you’re at sea.
I left the straight and narrow path a long time ago, I know that, when I felt my heart break and hid the curse rather than turn myself in.
Farther and farther I’ve wandered into lies and secrecy and rot, and now it feels like Silas Price of all people is offering a lifeline, a chance to get back to the light.
But to take the chance, I have to lie to my family and everyone around me and make bargains with finfolk, do them favors even.
Can I be forgiven if I sin in order to hold on to my life?
Then a sound from up ahead makes me realize I’m not alone in the sanctuary. A whisper of ragged breath. I freeze in the act of lighting a candle, scanning the pews I had thought empty.
Strange how heightened awareness can make the world more frightening.
Sometimes in quiet moments I can almost forget that I’m cursed, as doomed as the unfortunates clustered around the churchyard perimeter outside.
Then a pulse, the sound of someone else’s blood, catches my attention before I remember that’s wrong, unnatural, reminding me of all the threats both in the world and inside me.
It takes me a long moment to find him, kneeling in a pew a few rows up, head bowed low so that only his shoulders and a glimpse of wild dark curls rise over the top of the benches. My heart picks up and I take a few silent steps forward to see better.
Silas must be praying, but his posture isn’t prayerful; rather it’s as if some great weight is heaped upon him, his head hanging down and sweat dampening his shirt between his shoulder blades. His hands aren’t clasped together, but grip the back of the bench in front of him, knuckles white.
Inside me something shifts, sensing vulnerability and becoming suddenly attentive, interested.
Like a wolf in the woods coming across the blood-spotted trail of a wounded deer.
I swallow and try to push the monster down, but I can’t stop the sound of his ragged breath in my ears or the flow of saliva across my tongue.
He realizes my presence and turns, springing to his feet.
His face is pale and sweat-slicked and something is wrong with his eyes: white sclera and gray iris and black pupil all veiled in a shimmering rainbow sheen like a mirage, or an oil spill.
The kind that happens on the floor of the whale processing warehouse and must be mopped up quickly lest a stray spark from someone’s pipe send the whole enterprise up in flames.
Then he blinks and it’s gone, leaving his eyes gray and clear and watchful. “Lady Fairfax,” he says, voice hoarse.