Chapter 13 #2
A beat passes before Ezra’s reply comes. “Silas says you can succeed in this, so I’m choosing to believe him.” A skeptical note runs through his voice, an unspoken for now. “But send me away if you like—just don’t blame me if you get murdered.”
Suddenly I find that I don’t really want him to leave. I don’t want to be alone down here, though I’d jump in the sea before admitting it. “Well, when you put it like that, I suppose I could use an extra pair of eyes.”
“And what exactly are we looking for?”
Seeing as Ezra seems impossible to rattle, I don’t see the harm in telling him the truth. “I smelled blood down here earlier. Which doesn’t make sense because—”
“The Heralder is a new ship,” he finishes in a murmur. “Troublesome.”
A few yards in, I catch the trail again.
The faintest hint of a scent, yet it stands out from the smells of tar and sawdust and smoke that otherwise dominate.
It doesn’t smell like human blood or whale blood, not precisely.
There’s a similar metallic tinge, but it’s brinier, with a sharp edge of something like charcoal.
“You were cursed by the finfolk, weren’t you?” I say to Ezra as I retrace my steps back and forth, trying to determine where the scent is the strongest. “So why follow Silas? He’s one of them.”
According to Silas, his crew follows him because he’s promised to help them.
But that doesn’t seem to explain how fiercely defensive of Silas Ezra seems to be.
Young though he is—maybe in his early twenties—he strikes me as an experienced sailor.
Most whaling men would scorn to answer to a nineteen-year-old captain at all, much less a half finfolk one or a scavenger.
“No other captain will have a cursed sailor,” Ezra says with a touch of irritation. “You must know this.”
“You said your curse was that you couldn’t cross running water?” He nods. “You could hide that easily by not going far inland. Stop at the wharf, collect your pay, and sign up on another ship the next day. Lots of whalers do.”
“I don’t want to be on the sea forever,” he replies, quieter.
I feel a pang of sympathy at that, even though his curse to me still sounds like something to be envied. “And you really think,” I press, “he can take you to Drekja? And that the queen will heal you?”
Ezra starts to answer, but just then, the next breath I take is full of the blood scent and I stiffen, my feet moving automatically to follow the trail. It gets stronger and stronger as I weave through the barrels, the metallic edge as strong as a coin laid on my tongue. But then—
I stop inches from a wooden wall, so distracted by the blood smell that I barely stop myself from running straight into it.
There’s nothing there. Just barrels on either side of us labeled Nails and Bolts, and a wall in front.
I back away, looking down as though I might find a trail of blood there, but there’s nothing. Disappointment churns.
Yet Ezra is examining the wall, biting his lip. One long light brown hand rises to trace the curve of the planks. “This was constructed more recently than the rest of the ship,” he says quietly. “Look, the tar is still sticky.”
My mouth goes dry. “A false bulkhead,” I realize, pulling up the ship schematics in my head. No wall is meant to be here; there should be another row of barrels.
Ezra glances at me, eyes wide, then raps on the wall with his knuckles, once, twice. It rings out, clearly hollow behind.
My mouth is dry, my throat thick with the smell of blood as I run my hands over the wall, searching for some kind of entrance.
There’s nothing that I can find, except for a place where the wall joins with the true wall of the ship and a board is loose, sloppily nailed in.
Wordlessly I pass the lantern to Ezra and strip off my gloves, fitting claws into the grooves of the wood.
It wouldn’t be all that strange for a hold to have a storage room here. But why add one after the ship’s construction and not put it on the schematics? What would need to be held in a secret compartment rather than in the hundreds of barrels all around us? Why is there no door?
Knock, knock.
I rear back in shock, shoving a knuckle in my mouth to stifle a scream as Ezra swears under his breath. The rapping came from inside the compartment.
Someone or something is in there. Something bleeding. We both stay where we are for a long moment.
Then—“Let me,” Ezra whispers, taking my place crouching before the wall as he pulls out a large pocketknife, flips it open. I fall back to let him work at the plank until a section of it comes away, leaving a gap as big as my hand. He stoops to look into the gap.
Then his body goes rigid, and he swears creatively, tipping backward.
When he looks back at me, his face is pale, shocked.
Not so unflappable after all. Everything rational in me urges me to stay back, but morbid curiosity and the smell of blood together are too strong.
I crouch down too and my stomach drops precipitously.
It’s pitch-dark in the secret room with my face up against the gap, blocking the lantern light. Yet I can still see two jade green lights across the space, glowing in the black. Something deep in my gut recognizes them before my conscious mind does, jerking me back with an icy rush of dread.
Caught between a hungry sea and merciless stars, those lights once floated all around me, unblinking.
There’s the ch of a match striking. Ezra crouches next to me with a long lit match in his slightly shaking hand, ready to look, but instead I take the match from him and put it through the gap myself. The smell of blood is so strong, even though it’s like no blood I’ve ever smelled, inescapable.
Everything in me seems to turn to lead as the firelight fills the small space, as the green lights angle away from the candle.
The compartment is built around a thick wooden pillar that extends from floor to ceiling, which from its positioning must be the bottom part of the mainmast. Bound to the pillar in a kneeling position is one of the finfolk.
It takes me a minute to make sense of what I’m seeing, so different is he from the creatures that surrounded us on the open water the night the Volyar sank.
Here away from wind and moonlight, he seems diminished compared to the ethereal beings I saw, and perhaps even more terrifying.
Out on the sea, the finfolks’ garments concealed their faces, but now the dark clothes have been pinned down by chains, rippling weakly as if in an anemic breeze.
He is taller and thinner than a man, yet his face is more or less like a human’s except for a gray tint to his skin and those bright green eyes.
That face turns down toward me slowly. Pupils appear out of nothing and grow in his eyes, like something rising out of deep water, and focus on me.
I can’t breathe. The chains seem not to be wrapped around the mainmast, but rather feed through holes in the wood before wrapping around the finfolk’s limbs, his torso, his throat.
It must be iron. I can smell it and see the metal cutting into flesh, drawing green-black blood.
The finman’s lips part, revealing pointed white teeth, and a faint series of clicks emanates out. The same sound that for six years has formed the backdrop of my nightmares. I flinch back, almost dropping the match.
As I back slowly away, stunned, Ezra grips my elbow. “I’ll go find Silas.”
Terror sweeps through me at the prospect of being left alone down here with the finman. Ezra must see it on my face, his own softening slightly, though still pale with shock. “You go, then,” he says. “I’ll stay here.”
Part of me wants to protest—it feels wrong to leave Ezra here alone.
A bigger part wants to put the board back in place and forget I’ve seen anything at all, but I know I can’t.
Something malevolent is happening on the Heralder.
My family’s ship, I think with a surge of possessive anger.
I need to find out who’s behind this, and why.
I rush upstairs, taking the long way to avoid having to pass by the stateroom, where I imagine August will be having dinner with Mance.
On the upper deck, Silas is eating dinner with the rest of the Cursed Crew and my siblings.
Kit has a book open under his plate in his lap—of course he took his books with him even as a stowaway—and is eagerly telling Teuila and Zimri about giant squid sightings in the Aegira while Lydia and Josephine laugh at some private joke.
Silas sees me coming before the others do and seems to register something wrong on my face.
He gets up and paces to meet me before I reach the group, eyes alert. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. How to even begin to explain? And Silas’s people aren’t the only ones on deck; Heralder men are all around eating their dinners. “Ezra and I found something in the hold,” I manage. “Something you need to see.”
He blinks, concerned, and pivots to head toward the staircase. I move to follow him, then freeze as someone calls my name from the other direction. August.
Silas hears it too; his mouth thins. “Go to him if you like. I’ll find Ezra.” And he’s gone down the deck.
I turn to August, pulling on a smile that strains my already stretched nerves. The smell of blood from the hold still lingers in my throat, and I’m reminded that Silas told his crew to look out for me, told them about August.
If Silas isn’t lying and the memories in the shell are true—if August really did say those things—where does that leave me? It’s possible that August said those words and didn’t mean them. He could have been bluffing. Trying to manipulate Silas, win him over, knowing that Silas hates the Fairfaxes.
But believing in August is becoming more and more of a balancing act.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he says when we converge, reaching out to trace my face with the back of one finger. “Are you all right? You look ill.”