Chapter 27 #2
“What did you do?” she asks, looking up at me. I brace myself, expecting the absence of love to lead to a sharpening of anger and disappointment. But that’s not what I see. Instead there’s just … detachment.
“Annie,” she says, but it sounds like a question.
“I spoke with the fae queen,” I say. I step back and I’m not sure if it’s to give her space or to preemptively protect myself from her judgment. “She agreed to heal me, but for a price. I have to give her the love that other people have for me.”
I think she’ll be angry, but Lydia has no expression at all. Or more accurately, I can’t read her expression. “What does that mean?” Lydia asks.
I look into her eyes. “Do you love me?”
“Of course … you’re my sister,” she says. But her eyes slide down from me to focus on the ground. I hear the hollowness of her words.
“It’s okay,” I tell her after I catch my breath, all out of tears. “It’s better this way.”
I stand there in the rain and the smoking embers for a long time after Lydia walks away, trying to find the strength to go and fetch Silas.
I think about what I will say to him. I think about how he has suffered on my account enough, probably, to atone for his lies. I wonder how I can ensure he’ll walk away from all this as unscathed as possible, as unburdened.
In the end, I don’t have to find him. He appears silently amid the smoking rubble and pads toward me, unspoken things heavy between us.
Even though the queen healed him, he still looks like a broken ghost of the boy I danced with hours ago, pale and bruised with sand in his hair and blood on his clothes.
The embers cast deep shadows in the hollows of his face.
“I heard what you told your sister,” he says.
His voice is quiet and hoarse like it’s been scraped over rocks.
“I’ve heard stories about it. Trading love away.
” He stops a few steps from me, drawing his coat—too big, it must be borrowed or scavenged—tightly around himself.
“But the finfolk usually ask for three things. Three tasks or favors or gifts.”
I can’t bring myself to say more than: “She did.” I hold his gaze, willing him to understand.
He does. His eyes go haunted and he looks away, his throat bobbing as he swallows. “How … how does it work?”
I bite the inside of my cheek, rehearsing in my head the words I decided on before he appeared.
After I take his love, I want him to be free of any guilt.
And that will be easier, surely, if he thinks that our connection has been severed on both sides.
I don’t want him to know that my feelings for him remain.
So I weave just one small lie into what the queen told me.
“I’ll touch you,” I tell him, “and after that, our l—our feelings for each other will fade.” I stumble over the word.
“Our memories won’t disappear, we won’t forget anything that’s happened.
It’s just that the emotions about all of it will be gone.
” For you, at least. Not me. But he doesn’t need to know that.
I swallow and reiterate the lie once more for good measure. “For both of us.”
He sways just slightly toward me, hands coming out, and I can’t tell if it’s the lingering effects of blood loss or an aborted movement to pull me into him. In any case, he rights himself, lips pressed together and eyes shadowed. “What will you do after?” he asks at length.
Here is the part I haven’t thought about. I try to sound confident, not wanting him to be afraid for me, even if soon it won’t matter. “Go back to Kirkrell, I think. I don’t expect a hero’s welcome, but there must still be something I can do to stop whaling. Stop the war.” If it’s not too late.
“You won’t be safe there,” Silas says quietly, grief roughening his voice.
“I won’t be safe anywhere. But I have to try.” I open and close my fists to stop myself from reaching out for him, scales flaking off as I do. “Look after Kit and Lydia in Drekja?” I add softly. “None of this is their fault.”
His breath catches; his eyes spark with hurt. “I know that.”
“Yes, but I want you to remember. After.” It weighs on me, the possibility that in the absence of love, the hatred he once carried for me will return. I know he wouldn’t take it out on my siblings, whatever he felt for me. But I want to say it anyway.
His jaw works. “They’re as good as Whistler crew now.”
Bittersweet relief fills me. I know he’d protect any of his crew with his life, and for Kit and Lydia to be drawn into that circle assuages my fear for them. “Thank you.”
There’s so much else I want to say, but none of it will change what has to happen next. So I bite back the words and reach my hand out toward Silas, palm up.
Dread passes over his face; he draws breath, lips moving like he’s trying to form words. Then he steps past my outstretched hand and cups my face instead, bringing our bodies close together. My breath vanishes as he looks down at me, eyes wide and dark, a silent plea. Just once.
I know—I know even as my hands slip under his coat that this will only make things worse. But I’m so cold and tired and lost and there’s nothing left in me that can resist the gravity of him. I rise onto my toes so I can lift my face to his, just once.
He gasps softly when our lips touch, his hands threading into my hair still damp with seawater.
Moves in so our bodies are pressed together, keeping each other warm as the cold wind blows smoke around us.
The kiss is careful at first, both of us aware the circumstances aren’t ideal.
There’s the taste of blood on his lips; dried blood stiffens his shirt where I clutch at him.
Scales flake from my skin as we move together, and I still smell like the cavern beneath the sea that I crawled from minutes ago.
But then he drops one hand to my waist and pulls me against him, both of us swaying a little. My breath hitches, my lips parting beneath his, and Silas’s control seems to fray. His grip tightens as the tip of his tongue flickers over my lips.
“Remember this too,” he says against my mouth, low and ragged. “I didn’t want anyone else’s whole heart. I wanted the broken scraps of yours. Whatever you saw fit to give me.”
Sorrow spears through the desire in me like two currents meeting to form an undertow. It takes me down, sweeping away what remains of my judgment.
I pull his face back to mine, pushing my body into his hands.
He staggers but keeps us upright, our mouths pressed hard together.
I can feel the desperation in him, his body unyielding even as he pulls me tighter against him, crushing the breath out of both of us.
I tangle my hands in his hair, kissing his lips and his cheek and his jaw, trying to tell him how I feel without words, how much he deserves.
He shudders as I catch his bottom lip between mine.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper as he lowers his mouth to my throat. “So sorry.” I hope he remembers that too.
His movements slow, his mouth on my neck stilling to a chaste closemouthed kiss, and then no kiss at all, just holding me tight as we breathe together. Me lifted half off my feet, him trembling with his face tucked into my shoulder.
I would ask if he’s ready, but I know he’s not. I’m not either, but there’s no choice. I keep hold of him as he sets me on my feet and moves his hands to mine. I try to commit his eyes to memory—blown-wide pupils, wet lashes, emotion roiling under the surface.
“Keep your eyes closed until I say,” I tell him softly. I don’t want him to see how the light moves through him but not me.
He holds my gaze for a moment longer, then lets his eyes flutter closed. He steps back still holding my hands; they stay twined together until they can’t, wrists and palms and then finally fingertips slipping apart.
As he shudders and goes still, I shut my eyes too. I didn’t intend to, but I can’t watch the love leave him. Still I see the brightness through my closed eyelids, feel the heat of it traveling down and dissipating under my feet.
When I finally open my eyes again, he’s already looking at me. It’s like the world has cycled through the seasons in the space of a moment, summer storm clouds freezing over. The warmth that had filled me after the kiss recedes, my skin chilling under his gaze.
“Silas?” I whisper.
He looks at me for a long moment, then takes something out of his coat pocket. Another seashell, mottled purple and gray, the kind the finfolk enchant to hold memories.
“This was on the beach when I went in after you,” he says. His voice sounds the same on the surface, but there’s a remoteness underneath, something brittle and sharp. “I knew then you’d come back. I knew I was meant to show you.”
He holds his hand out with the seashell inside. I stare at him, willing myself not to shake. I don’t want to know what’s in that shell. Not when the last one shattered everything between us.
But I suppose that means there’s nothing more to break.
With his expectant eyes on me, I put my hand over his, the shell caught between our palms.
Immediately I cry out and try to pull away, but Silas’s other hand clamps down around my wrist, keeping me in place. Behind my eyes, Kirkrell falls to the finfolk.
The sea has burst the bounds of the harbor and rages through the streets I’ve walked my whole life, rendering them unrecognizable.
Black boats slide over waters filthy with oil and rubbish and bodies.
Too-tall figures wreathed in shadows fit long fingers beneath windowsills, loom over beds.
Men with rifles and knives clatter toward the harbor, chased by billows of smoke and distant screams.
“This is what I was running from.” Silas’s icy voice cuts through the visions, but I can’t see him though my eyes are open. The real world around me is gone, washed away in fire and flood.
“Why?” I gasp through tears. A horrible idea surfaces; it doesn’t make sense, but maybe, maybe he hates me this much. “Are you cursing me now?”
“No.” Silas grips my hand hard enough for the sharp ridges of the shell to cut both our palms, but the pain barely registers, blinded as I am by the images of war. “This is a warning.”
“I know the war will come,” I say in anguish. “You don’t have to show me—”
My words die in choked silence, my breath seeming to turn to stone in my lungs. Because behind my eyes hangs another face, familiar and pale and impossibly still, eyes wide and sightless.
My knees give out beneath me. Whip-quick, Silas grabs my upper arms, holding me up while the shell falls and rolls away in the ashes. The echoing screams cease, but the lifeless face remains, burned into my memory.
When I look at Silas, tears blur my vision, but I can still feel the iciness of his regard.
“Please,” I beg in a whisper. “How do I stop it?”
Much later, shivering awake in my own bed deep into the night, I will turn his next words over and over in my mind.
It’s as if he knew. Knew that after a few days of stumbling south down the coast with scavenged food and blankets, my fingertips blue with frostbite, a Nunak fishing boat would find me. That we would cross paths with a ship bound for Kirkrell. That I’d return home.
That trading Silas, Kit, and Lydia’s love to the finfolk queen would be only one in a string of terrible bargains I’d yet to strike.
But right now, all that is still far away. Silas settles me on my feet and his hands leave me; he steps back from me.
His voice is so cold as he tells me: “Start walking.”