Chapter 7 #2
I blink too, wondering if something has gone wrong with my vision.
Did I imagine the sheen over his eyes? An image hangs momentarily in my mind.
Silas as a child in the lifeboat, his eyes blotted out white then too.
But when I try to focus, to recall the memory, it swims away, and I can’t decide if it’s real or not.
For a stretching moment we regard each other across the pews. Two creatures not quite human. His face is still pale, and seeing his weakness makes me feel cold and vengeful.
But—Lydia’s voice in my head. This isn’t who you are.
I swallow against a dry throat. Push the monster down as best I can and find my voice. “Are you all right?” My voice seems overloud in the silence all around us.
Silas wipes his brow with his sleeve and runs a hand through his hair, self-consciousness in his movements. “Fine,” he says in a clipped tone. “A migraine. I get them sometimes.”
That doesn’t explain the sheen over his eyes, if it was ever there, but I decide not to care. Whatever ails him, it doesn’t affect me; it’s not my business. “I thought finfolk can’t tread on holy ground,” I say instead.
I’ve seen Silas in church before—at my parents’ funeral, here and there at services—and always wondered about that, but I never asked since we weren’t acknowledging our secrets out loud until now. The stories say finfolk despise all things holy. Iron and crosses, prayers and church bells.
“Holy is what people say is holy,” Silas says, shortly. He walks to join me in the aisle. “A church is just a building; a cross is just a shape. The finfolk existed before any of this was built. Why would it hurt them?”
What to make of the fact that when he speaks of the finfolk, he says them, not us? “But you were praying, weren’t you? Why, if you think holiness is just a construction?”
His gaze slides from mine; he glances over his shoulder, up at the stained glass windows casting us in jeweled light. “I always pray before a voyage. To the Maker. To Thala and Haelgrim and the Sollish god-lights. To anyone else I can think of.”
“That seems sacrilegious,” I say, though Maker knows I’ve blasphemed too much in the privacy of my own head to judge anyone else for it. “Which ones do you believe in?”
“I believe in what I can see. In storms and shipwrecks. I believe that my crew is relying on me and now you are too.”
As he speaks, his eyes dip down my throat and catch on something, and I realize the bone pendant I received in the chamber beneath the Spout—I put it on a chain like he said, like the Cursed Crew do—has slipped from my dress’s high collar.
Heat washes up my neck as I hastily tuck it back beneath the cloth. I must be more careful.
Silas doesn’t miss any of this. His eyes glitter with an expression I can’t read. “We’ve a lot of sea ahead of us,” he says. “If there are blessings to be had, whatever the source, I would be a fool and a poor sailor to disdain them.”
Hot wax trickles over my fingers, making me flinch even though the fabric of my gloves keeps it from burning my skin. I half turn from him to finish lighting the candles, but the unpleasant reminder of our imminent voyage has ignited worry in my chest.
“On the Heralder we’ll be taking a straight shot northeast,” I say, affecting casualness as I raise the candle to light another. “Aside from maybe a resupply or two. What if we don’t cross paths with any finfolk? What are the odds that I’ll just happen upon the chance to do them favors?”
“You’re thinking about this like a human, Lady Fairfax, mathematically. But that’s not how it works. It’s not about odds.” Silas walks to a candle across the aisle, raising a hand to cup the wick. “The finfolk are writing a story with us. The story requires favors, so the chances will come.”
“Writing a story with us?” I look sharply toward him. “We’re not—”
Then my words die in my throat as I realize two things: firstly that Silas has no candle of his own, and secondly that the air has taken on a strange, charged feeling like sometimes happens before a thunderstorm. There’s a minute snap, a spark flickering between his fingers like bottled lightning.
When he moves his hand away, the candle is lit and his gaze rises to mine, a challenge in it, daring me to say something.
My mouth dries up in the face of this finfolk magic. Three times now I’ve seen him do something unnatural—the shell, the ice, and now the flame. It feels even more wrong under the eaves of the church. Strange that the truths about each other we always pretended not to know are out in the open.
I make my voice flat and unbothered as I finish my thought. “We’re not tools for them.”
“Believe that if you like,” he says, moving to the next candle. “But why do you think they let us live?”
My answer comes readily without having to think about it. “Because you asked them to.”
The memories crash in. Most of the crew of the Volyar had gone out after a whale when the storm came.
The only ones still on the ship were me, my mother, and a handful of the crew, including the two other children on the ship—August Hargreave, Papa’s bright-eyed apprentice, and the captain’s son, Silas Price, strange and always alone.
Mama and I stood at the railing, passing a spyglass back and forth between us.
The crew in their whaleboats had rowed so far after their quarry that they were as small as ants on the horizon.
I wanted to see them kill the whale; Mama had little appetite for such things but hoped only to keep an eye on Papa, make sure he was being safe.
Mama saw them first. I still remember how her body went rigid and her face paled.
Don’t move an inch, she’d said, then turned and ran flat out for the mainmast.
My mother never ran. Everything she did was graceful and dignified. But she ran now, seizing a rope off the mainmast in her delicate hands and pulling it with all her strength. The bell halfway up the mast began a frantic, rhythmic cry to call the boats back to the ship.
She’d dropped the spyglass; I picked it up and put it to my eye to search out what she had seen.
Everything in me went cold. Past the rowboats and the whale, on the horizon all around us, dark figures crept up out of the gloom.
Tall and thin, they stood in strange longboats, wrapped in shadows that could be cloaks or fins.
They advanced on us without the benefit of sail or oar, faster than anything natural can move, and overhead, dense greenish clouds raced in even faster.
Lady Fairfax—
Unprotected by the ship and exhausted from the chase, the crew in the whaleboats didn’t stand a chance.
I watched through the spyglass as waves tall as houses formed behind them, formed out of nothing, rising from the sea like living things before converging on the whaleboats.
Thin screams reached us over the water, drowned out by the alarm bell and the sudden boom of thunder.
My mother had joined the skeleton crew as they scrambled to adjust the sails, desperate to reach the whaleboats before the waves did.
But then—lightning, forking down from the clear evening sky, igniting our mainmast in a plume of flame. The ship shuddered and lurched like a shot beast as the ensuing thunderclap drove me to my knees, spyglass rolling away.
Lady Fairfax—
With hands over my ears and eyes squeezed shut, I didn’t realize I was directly in the path of the falling mainmast until it was too late.
I felt the heat at the crown of my head, then hands on my chest, shoving me out of the way.
I opened my eyes and saw Mama’s face, full of love and grief, in the second before the flaming mast came down.
Sometimes in my darker moments I can still feel the scream climbing my throat, like I didn’t get it all out that night. Like shreds of the scream still linger, rotting, in my lungs, and I’ll never get them out.
“Annie!”
The voice jolts me back to the sanctuary, back to the skin on my arms crawling as scales threaten to burst through, back to aching fingertips and a chest that feels split open. Silas is right in front of me, hands gripping my upper arms, shaking me slightly.
“Not here,” he hisses. His eyes are wide and fearful as they fly from my face to the door of the sanctuary. “Listen to me. Not here.”
But I can’t hold on to the present, not with his storm-cloud eyes on me just like they were that night, the electric smell of finfolk magic in my nose.
Distantly, I can feel him adjust his grip on my arms, bodily propelling me somewhere.
But most of my mind is in a lifeboat as it lowered toward the water, the Volyar creaking ponderously over my head as bolt after bolt of unnatural lightning pummeled it.
The smell of petrichor and burning flesh.
Debris from shattered whaleboats spinning past us in the water.
August locking his limbs around me, ignoring how I battered at him with my small fists, as we saw Papa’s body float by, empty eyes turned to the clouds.
All at once the finfolk were there around us, ringing our lifeboat. So many of them. Motionless figures of shadow, steady even as the wind howled and their dark garments rippled around them, inhumanly tall and still. Only their eyes showed, pale and glistening in the sudden dark.
In the present, a door closes; darkness falls.
In memory, the thunder and crackling flames and waves crashing and the alarm bell still clanging—it all faded like someone had dropped a great glass cloche over our boat.
The torrent of heartbreak was momentarily quieted by some deep-seated prey instinct to be still and silent beneath the gaze of a predator.
Even without seeing the finfolks’ faces, I could tell their attention was trained on Silas.
August and I watched as he stood up in the lifeboat prow, shaking all over.
In no language that I could understand, but unmistakably a language, they spoke to Silas.
And he spoke back.