Chapter 20
Belowdecks, a few men are leaving the kitchen with crates of ale. I lurk in the hallway waiting for them to leave before I knock at Silas’s door.
No answer. I try again. “Silas?”
Nothing but a choked kind of gasp.
Oh Maker, maybe he really is hurt. I could have failed to notice in all the chaos of the hunt; he could have hidden it as we rowed back to the ship.
There were so many sharp edges, so much blood, who could say what was whaleblood and what was his?
My heart bobs to my throat and my hands move to open the door.
Stepping inside, I recoil at the sight of something soft and sodden smeared across the floor. A dead animal, I think, like the carriage-struck rats in the streets of Kirkrell.
But no—it’s Silas’s discarded shirt, seeping blood and seawater over the floorboards.
He kneels beside his bunk across the cabin, back to me, gripping the side, head down.
A lantern on the nightstand casts everything in low yellow light.
The relative cleanness of his bare back makes the red everywhere else all the more grotesque.
His arms are stained to the elbow and more blood mottles his neck, muscles jumping beneath his skin as he gags over a bucket, but nothing comes out.
Everything in me wants to look away, my own stomach turning at the gore and the sounds. But he saved me out in the water. What kind of coward would I be to leave him to it now? My feet still feel outside my control. They carry me to crouch next to him.
“Silas,” I say, touching his shoulder. His bare shoulder, the pale expanse of his back damp with sweat.
His breath hitches, spine shifting under his skin, and I have to stop myself from the impulse to trace my fingers down the ladder of his vertebrae.
My mouth burns with the memory of his. Not a kiss. Just air, just him saving my life.
He flinches away; his voice, when it comes, is scarcely audible. “I’m fine.” He leans his head on his forearms, hair falling around like a curtain. “I’ll be fine.”
And here I thought I was a poor liar. “Really?” I demand, worry making my voice high and strident, my words spilling out fast. “When was the last time you slept? Or ate something? I can get something from the kitchen—”
Silas’s breath escapes in a half-hearted mockery of a laugh. “Please leave, Annie.” The words come colder now. “You can’t help me.”
Hurt pricks at my chest. I drop my hand but stay where I am, kneeling next to him. “You saved my life out there.”
“And ended another,” he says, quieter. “My ledger isn’t looking very good.”
My stomach twists. I know what it’s like to feel the weight of lives lost like stones in your pocket. “The whale was suffering. You gave it mercy.”
“I could have stopped the hunt. Called a storm.”
“They’d have killed you for that.”
He stays quiet, fingers twisting themselves into the bedsheets and leaving red smears on the linen. I get the horrible feeling that in the moment, maybe even now, he wouldn’t have cared if they’d killed him.
“I saw you with the whale calf,” he says at length. “You almost drowned scaring it off.”
My throat tightens at the memory. “It wasn’t selfless.” I’m not that altruistic, tempting though it might be to let him think so. “I want to break my curse.”
“Two favors down now?” The ghost of a smile in his voice.
“Two,” I confirm. We sit with that for a moment, anxiety building up in my gut.
We’re nearly to Kielstraat and I still don’t know if that will be enough.
I swallow it down and turn my thoughts back to Silas.
“Do you want to clean up?” I suggest, going for a mix of briskness and gentleness. “You’ll feel better.”
He turns his head, showing me his face still streaked with dried blood. The oil-slick film over his eyes that tells me he’s not seeing this room at all but visions of war.
“It’ll pass,” he says, voice small, strained. “Just need a minute.”
I let out a slow breath, willing my own hand not to shake. I feel unsteady, like we’re still out in the whaleboat, buffeted by waves, but I need to be a steady presence for him. Colors roil in his eyes, irises and pupils invisible beneath the unnatural sheen.
But seconds, then minutes tick by and his breaths come faster, his pulse races. I know I can’t snap him out of the visions, but I can do something.
“Can you turn around?” I ask finally. “Turn around and sit against the bed.”
I expect him to argue, but after a moment, he moves to sit cross-legged with his back against the side of the bed, eyes still filled with the colors.
The contrast between his pale bare chest and the reddish-brown stains covering the rest of him, everything up from his collarbone and down from his elbows, is still startling.
I’m already moving to the dresser, finding a washcloth, and filling a bowl with water from a pitcher.
After a moment’s consideration, I take off my gloves too and lay them beside the basin. I feel strangely calm, like within the space of this cabin only, I can forget everything else because Silas needs me. Here, I’ve outrun all my fears, if only momentarily.
There are different kinds of fear, I suppose.
The adrenaline-soaked kind when you’re surrounded by pummeling waves and broken boats and screaming men, and the deeper kind that lives in your bones and whispers to you that you’re not fit to draw breath.
That kind has had its claws in me for months, but strangely, at this moment, it’s nowhere to be found as I wet the cloth and wring it out.
When I come back, kneeling in front of Silas and setting the bowl beside us, he turns his face up toward me, but I know he doesn’t see me. I take a deep breath, letting it out as quietly as I can, and raise the wet cloth to his face, touching it against his cheek.
He flinches, then seems to master himself and settles back against the side of the bed, his eyes fluttering shut. As I run the cloth along his cheekbone, his eyes still dart around beneath his lids.
“What do you see?” The words spill out without my expecting them to. I don’t really want to know, but I feel like I have to. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know if we can stop it,” he says quietly as I move the cloth to his ear, wiping away a spot of blood there. “What if the shareholders won’t accept an end to whaling? What if it’s too late?”
I’ve never heard him talk like this, doubting the one thing he’s always been dead set on.
He looks more like himself with a clean face, but it also makes it harder to ignore the dark shadows under his eyes, the anguish twisting his mouth.
I settle back on my heels and take his left wrist, tugging gently to get him to extend his arm. “What can we do besides try?”
His pulse races beneath my hand. Each pass of the cloth down his arm reveals skin so unlike mine—smooth and soft, no scales or claws, just constellations of freckles, small scars here and there, the price of life on the sea.
“We could run,” he says. “Take your siblings and the crew. Leave the war behind.”
I scoff softly. “And go where?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere you want.”
His words dissipate into charged silence. The idea feels like the north star, cold and glittering and impossible. Running away from all this. The idea has its appeal, but …
“I’m still heartbroken,” I remind him. Rinse the cloth and reach for his other arm. “And even if the finfolk queen heals me, I can’t just wash my hands of Kirkrell and leave it behind.”
A shadow of pain crosses his face, an expression I can’t quite interpret. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. It’s just a daydream.”
His eyes have stopped darting around beneath his eyelids, and I wonder if he’s stopped seeing the war visions, if he just doesn’t want to look at me.
An ache grows in my chest as I cradle his hand between both of mine, trying to wipe away every place where dried blood has settled—around his nails, in the creases of his knuckles, the lines of his palm.
I understand how it feels to be overwhelmed by a reality that feels insurmountable.
But I want—I want him to believe in me, that I can end whaling, that I will.
He seemed to trust me so readily even as I lied to him about my intentions.
And now his faith is faltering just when I’ve finally made up my mind, when I thought we’d be standing together.
“You could leave,” I point out. I keep my tone level. “You could have left Kirkrell years ago. Why didn’t you?”
“I had to pass along the finfolks’ message.” His breathing hitches as the cloth moves between his splayed fingers, and something in me answers, an ember flaring in my middle.
Unease prickles. Maybe I should leave, let him finish washing up if he’s no longer blinded by the visions.
But it feels like stopping now would be an admission of guilt, proof that his closeness and vulnerability are affecting me.
If I finish the job, clean up the blood and walk away, I’m just doing a favor for a friend in need. That’s all.
“You could have left still, given us the message and gone somewhere else. Anywhere else.” I keep my eyes down, focusing on his hand, hot in mine.
My mind flickers back to that day at my parents’ funeral, and I wonder if Silas’s does too, if he’s listening to me tell him You should have died with the rest of them.
But Silas never held that against me, I realize. Not then and not now. “You could go anywhere,” I say again when he doesn’t reply. “Why did you stay?” Why stay on the bloody, vicious, grease-choked, possibly doomed island that is Kirkrell?
“Because of you.”
He speaks simply, plainly, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. A quiet shock wave ripples through me. “What do you mean?”