Chapter 7 #3
And then the finfolk let us go.
“Stay with me,” he says now, voice low and urgent. His fingers sink into my arms, dragging me back to the present.
We’re in one of the vestibules off the sanctuary, a tiny room barely wider than the doorway we came through, and maybe six paces long.
Dimly I realize it’s the church’s memorial to the lost of the Volyar.
Panels of carved scrimshaw inscribed with scripture verses, depictions of ships and flowers and birds and beasts and the hawk from the Fairfax family crest; no candles are lit, but there’s just enough light to outline the plaque set into the far wall, commemorating the lost captain and crew, so very many names and dates, and its passengers Lord Richard Fairfax and Lady Annabelle Fairfax.
Two small windows to either side overlook the churchyard.
If I looked outside I would see my parents’ tombstones marking the spot where two empty coffins lie beneath the grass.
Papa’s strong hands and Mama’s kind eyes and all the rest of them rot somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Because of the finfolk.
“You’re all right,” Silas says, eyes drilling into mine. “Pull it together. The churchgoers are arriving.”
“You asked the finfolk to let us live,” I say again, groggily, trying to stay in the moment.
Why does his gaze threaten to pull me under?
I yank back from Silas and retreat as far as the tiny room will allow, pressing my hands to the wall to ground myself.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to reclaim my thoughts.
The bone pendant feels heavy around my neck. The favors—that’s what Silas and I were speaking about. The favors I have to do for the finfolk in order to be healed. His conviction that my chances will come because fate dictates it. No, not fate—the finfolk.
“Yes.” In the dim light of the vestibule—the only illumination the slanted, weak rays coming in through the small windows—Silas looks haunted, ghostly. “I asked them to let us live. But they wouldn’t have agreed without a purpose. They gave me a message I was meant to carry back to shore.”
“A message?” So many years of trying to block out the memories of the finfolk make it difficult to remember the particulars—a general sense of terror and grief swamps the details.
The sounds they had made, surrounding us, were composed of echoing, rhythmic clicks rather than words. “What was the message?”
Silas is silent a long moment, regarding me as if evaluating whether I can be trusted.
It makes my skin itch, because he shouldn’t trust me.
What just happened out in the sanctuary was too close a call.
That makes three times in less than two weeks that the heartbreak has nearly gotten the better of me, that I’ve felt like I was losing my grip on myself.
“Why I asked you to end whaling,” he says finally. “Because if whaling doesn’t end, the finfolk will make war on us.”
My nails scrape against the wall as my hands twitch, the claws threatening to push through the fabric of my gloves as my mind attempts to wrap itself around the words.
I want to think it a joke, but Silas’s face—pale, eyes burning with surely the same memories that haunt my mind—undercuts any possibility.
“Why haven’t you said anything all this time?” I manage. My voice comes out hoarse, somewhere between a whisper and a wheeze. By contrast, his is barely audible.
“Would anyone have believed me? Do you believe me now?”
There’s something pleading, almost childlike in the question, the way his shoulders hunch.
Like he wants me to absolve him. But I won’t.
These past few days, it’s been him pulling the strings.
Showing up in my room, summoning me to the Spout, feeding out what he knows—the knowledge that could save my life—in small, controlled segments, like I’m a fish on a line he’s reeling in. Time to take back control.
“We were all half dead,” I hiss. “Whatever they said to you could have been a hallucination.”
“That doesn’t explain why they let us go.” He slumps back against the door, looking like he regrets everything about this exchange.
“A lie, then. The finfolk manipulating you.” I know the fury rising in me is only slightly less dangerous than the memories that gripped me a moment ago.
That it can accelerate heartbreak too. But anger feels so much better than grief.
“We’re already at war with the finfolk. Every year they sink our ships—what is that if not an act of war? ”
“Those are skirmishes.” Now anger threads into Silas’s voice too. “It could be so much worse. They could make the sea impassable and cut us off from the mainland. Or come ashore like in the old days.”
“Why now, then?” I press. “If the finfolk wanted to attack us, they’ve had centuries to do it. Centuries when we were weaker and fewer than we are now. Why would they choose now, when we have gunpowder and iron bullets?”
Throughout all human history they have kept to the shadows.
Picking us off in storms and sneaking into villages by the light of the moon.
If the finfolk were capable of exacting a cost greater than they already did every year—wrecked ships, dead sailors, countless souls lost to the sea—why wouldn’t they have done it already?
“Because the whales are disappearing,” he says. “That’s what’s changed. The finfolk won’t let the Livyati die out. They’ll go to war to stop whaling, even if a war will be their own ruin.”
The words—and the utter resigned conviction with which he says them—send a chill through me. “You should have said something sooner.”
He looks sorry, but not sorry enough. “Nothing would have come of it. Except maybe I’d have been driven out of the city.”
“But now you think it can be done because…” I wait for him to reply, but then realize the answer myself. “Because you have leverage over me. You can take me to Drekja, or so you say.”
His answering shrug makes my rage flare hotter than ever.
To my eyes he has all the freedom in the world to do as he wills.
And yet he acts like the finfolk have bound him in chains.
Like he has no other choice but to play foot soldier in their efforts to end whaling.
“You might have accepted that you’re a—a tool, or a messenger, or however it is you see yourself,” I tell Silas, pitching my voice low.
“But this isn’t a fae tale for me. It’s my life.
I’m doing this for my family and the Fairfax Company. Don’t forget that.”
“I don’t think you’d let me, even for a second, Lady Fairfax.”
“Maybe a war would be justified,” I add recklessly. “The finfolk killed my parents. They killed your father.”
He stiffens. “I was there. I remember.” His voice warns me that I’m nearing a threshold I oughtn’t cross. “I don’t expect you to trust me. You don’t have to. But you do have to keep your promise. End whaling. Or the war will cost us dearly.”