Chapter 15 #4
A hollow, numb kind of shock sinks in. So it really is that simple.
He hasn’t pulled me with him to the bed or even asked me to join him. He just watches me steadily, waiting to see what I’ll do.
I could leave, but to what end? August might go to the hold and find Silas and Lydia. And I do want to know the truth about the prisoner. Silas’s words from earlier echo in my head.
You have access to information. You can find out what their game is.
The more brave I appear, the safer I will be, and the more I will learn.
I go and sit next to August, the thin mattress dipping under my weight. He turns his head and presses his face into my hair, breathes in, like I’m what gives him strength.
“I was thinking about the Volyar,” he says, hushed, slipping an arm behind my back to wrap around my waist. “About all the ships and all the lives that have been lost to the finfolks’ storms. Come here.”
He tugs at my waist, and understanding what he wants, I shift so I’m sitting between his legs, my back against his chest. As he wraps his arms around me and rests his chin on my shoulder, I can feel my heart start to slow, the fear that had been skittering through my blood metabolizing into a different kind of energy.
I let my body go soft, allowing myself to lean against him.
He must have a reason for all this. Maybe if I just hear him out …
“What a wonder, to be able to control the wind and the rain,” he goes on.
“And I thought—why not use that to our advantage?” Even though he’s only murmuring quietly, his words start to take on the same thrilling expansiveness he gets in front of a crowd that has won over the shareholders and bewitched the merchants of Kirkrell.
The tone of voice that makes you believe a straight, wide path to everything you ever wanted is laid out before you.
That August knows the way, and that he can lead you there, and all you have to do is follow.
“Nothing like what happened to us would ever happen again.”
Still, my stomach turns, thinking of the smell of fresh blood in the hold. How is the finman convinced to call down the wind to fill our sails?
“It seems cruel,” I whisper, internally bracing myself. “Keeping someone in the dark, keeping them bound in iron.”
“Someone?” August echoes, a hint of surprised laughter in the word.
“Annie, a finfolk isn’t someone. And cruelty—cruelty is the finfolk killing our families.
Cruelty is them cursing our sailors and blighting our city, sentencing you to death for the crime of loving your parents and grieving their loss.
” Conviction strengthens his voice as he traces my hands tenderly over my jacket cuffs.
“This is hardly a drop in the sea of bloodshed they’ve unleashed on us. A feather on the scale.”
The ache of missing my parents mixes into the tempest of emotions swirling in my chest. How I wish I could speak to Mama and Papa now.
Maybe they could help me understand what is true, what is necessary, what is right.
“Who else knows about this?” I ask, nervously plucking at the fingers of my leather gloves. “The crew?”
“Only Mance.” August captures my hands between his own and peels the gloves off, left and then right.
They fall discarded to the floor as he turns my palms up, tracing idle patterns from my fingers, across my palms, up my wrists.
I was careless in my routine this morning.
Scattered scales wink in the low light; my nails extend out past my fingertips, reddish-black and sharp. But August doesn’t seem to care.
“This is only the first test,” he says. “Imagine the yield, Annie, if every ship in the fleet could sail twice as fast as it does now. We’d never lose a whale again.
” His lips brush the shell of my ear, breath cascading hot down the side of my neck.
“But I am sorry. I should have told you. You shouldn’t have had to find out like that. ”
“And I’m sorry I didn’t ask you about it sooner,” I say between stuttering breaths of my own. I’m not sorry, but it feels like what I should say—what he expects me to say.
He turns my face up toward his with two fingers, kisses me softly at first. Then the kiss deepens; he catches my lower lip between his teeth and tugs gently, scattering the remnants of my thoughts.
Breaking away slightly, he murmurs, “You have nothing to apologize for.” Another kiss, the tip of his tongue flickering over my lips.
“It will take more than a little misunderstanding to frighten me from you, my love.” He lifts me up to sit on his thigh, so he can kiss my neck.
“I have to admit, though, I thought you’d be upset. ”
“I was at first,” I say, twisting to get my arms around his shoulders. “But I understand. We need every advantage we can get.” I hesitate. “But how did you capture … this one? How will you find more?”
“That’s my girl. Every inch a Fairfax.” I feel him smile openmouthed against my throat, teeth grazing my skin. “I have some plans up my sleeve still.”
“Flatterer,” I say breathlessly. His hands are almost too tight against my waist, but I want them tighter.
My own hands, resting carefully on his back, twitch with the desire to touch him like he’s touching me, firm and decisive.
But I can’t. Not without hurting him or, at the very least, ruining his clothes.
“I’m not,” he protests. “You’re stronger than I ever knew, to have fought back the curse. Brave, to accompany me on this expedition.” The tip of his tongue leaves a trail of embers down the side of my neck. “And clever to have found the prisoner. Even if you had to go behind my back to do it.”
If there’s the barest hint of threat in his words, I’m too far gone to register it the way I should.
The awareness dances across my mind like a skipped stone and is gone as one hand slips under the hem of my shirt, fingers skimming the bare skin above my hip.
I kiss him again, my muscles turning soft as his tongue dances with mine.
In the scene from the seashell, August said he would marry me at sea, then find a way to end my life. But none of that has happened so far. Maybe Silas misunderstood his words, or misremembered.
“I wish I could touch you,” I whisper when we break off to breathe.
I have one hand braced on August’s back, the other cupping the back of his head carefully, so carefully.
The scales on my skin glitter in the low light; I close my eyes so I don’t have to see them.
The words escape me, grieved and plaintive. “How can you want me like this?”
He doesn’t know I’m looking for a cure. As far as he knows, this is all he’ll ever have of me—heartbroken, beating back the tide of the curse, unable to put my hands on his skin for fear of breaking it.
The words float unbidden into my mind. I’ll drop to my knees, tell her I can’t wait any longer. We’ll marry at sea.
“Touching you is pleasure enough.” His voice is midnight dark, velvet dark, as he hauls me closer against him. “Keep your hands there. Let me take care of you.” His hand climbs my ribs, seeking upward.
And then at some point, there will be a storm. There always is.
But his ragged breath in my ear, the hungry, greedy way his hands range over me—that doesn’t seem like a lie.
His fingertips are drawing circles over my skin, making me whimper and squirm against him, my head tipping back onto his shoulder as everything in me turns to water.
It’s impossible to think the sound he makes at that, satisfied and hungry all at once, is anything but sincere.
His body is tense beneath mine, his pulse raging. He closes his teeth almost too hard on the side of my throat, making me jolt in his arms, every movement stoking the fire higher and higher. His desire echoing mine. That has to mean something.
I am not the same blinkered, weak-willed girl I was in Kirkrell. Maybe August sees that in me, that this voyage has forged me into something better. He said I’m stronger than he knew. Maybe I’ve proved my worth to him.
Maybe, just for tonight, I can believe that.