Chapter 25
I t takes two weeks for the town healer to release Maddox from his care.
By the time we return to the ship, the crew has already received word about Nolan’s recovery thanks to a carrier pigeon Charlie hired in town.
Thus, the celebrations have already been going on for hours by the time we reach the ship.
“You sure they’re celebrating and you’re not being attacked by a gang of rival pirates?” asks Victor as an explosion of fireworks erupts from the deck of the ship and lights up the night sky.
“We’re privateers,” says Maddox, rather moodily. Though I suppose he has an excuse. He’s still having to nurse a bottle of a disgusting antidote the healer in town provided Charlie in order to heal his wounds from the raven’s talons.
I hadn’t even noticed until Maddox pointed it out that my wounds were completely healed. When he’d asked how that had happened, I’d simply shrugged, assuming it had something to do with the magic of the Youngest Sister’s cottage.
“Right. Privateers,” says Victor, widening his eyes at me so that Maddox can’t see.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a celebration,” I say, though as a cannon goes off, rattling the ground beneath our feet, I wince, suddenly unsure.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?” I ask my friend, hopeful, despite his turning down my offer at the house.
Victor scratches his chin, messing up his beard. “You know you’re like family to me, Winds.”
“But?”
Victor goes sheepish.
“But I’m not home.” I say it so he doesn’t have to. “It’s okay.” I spare one last glance into town, hearing the chatter echoing from the docks.
“You’ll come back to visit, though?” he asks. “We have plenty of tourist activities, after all.”
I laugh. “I’ll come back, but only for the tourist activities.”
Victor’s lip curves, then he pulls me into a hug. “John would have been happy. To see you so happy, I mean.”
Tears well in my eyes, but I hold them back. I can’t bring myself to cry. Victor means well, but I’m not sure I’m happy yet. I’m not sure I’ll ever know that sensation for more than a few fleeting moments at a time.
After our goodbyes are said, Nolan leads me by the hand to the rope ladder the crew let down for us at the edge of the ship. When I hop onto the ladder, Nolan grins at me.
“What?”
“I just like watching you climb. That’s all.”
My lips twitch into a guilt-ridden smile. Nolan must catch it, because his eyes narrow slightly and he tilts his head to the side, but I dart up the ladder before he can question me.
Once I’m up top, I’m met by Michael, singing a song that only could have been taught to him by one of the members of the crew—a rather violent tune definitely not appropriate for children, though now that Michael has it memorized, I imagine I’ll be hearing it for months on end.
Evans comes running up behind my brother, huffing. “Finally, you’re back,” he says, eyes pinning me as if he’s trying to make me feel guilty for my absence.
“Did he give you trouble?” I ask, rubbing the top of Michael’s head.
“Trouble?” asks Evans. “He found one of my navigation books, then wouldn’t let me rest until I’d recited every single coordinate on every single map. I tried to explain to him that coordinates are for locating things, but he would not be dissuaded.”
I laugh, which only seems to perturb Evans more. “Michael likes some things just for the existence of them. Their purpose doesn’t matter so much.”
Evans mutters something incoherent, then scurries off.
It’s not long before Nolan, Maddox, and Charlie follow me on the rope ladder, Maddox bickering with Charlie about how he didn’t need help climbing over, him slipping, and her giving him an I told you so look.
Nolan opens his mouth, and before he can ask me what’s wrong again, I grab him by the hand and lead him to the center of the deck, which the crew has made into a dance floor by pushing the barrels out of the way.
Thankfully for my purposes, the current dance is one that’s predicated on switching partners, so Nolan hardly gets the chance to get his next word out before another crew member takes my hand and whirls me around the ship, passing me off to the next.
Nolan glares at me, though not unkindly. Every time we pass in the dance, I feel his searing gaze upon me. My next partner is Vor, one of the guards who used to guard the faerie dust room. Now that there’s none on board and we’ve grown used to using the sails alone, there’s no need.
“What are you doing now?” I ask Vor, who gives me a toothy grin.
“Working in the kitchens,” he says.
“Do you miss guarding the storeroom?” I ask.
“You mean, do I miss standing there doing nothing all day for the three minutes you’d walk by trying to get in?”
I suppose that was a stupid question, but I grin all the same. “But surely you found my company so pleasing, my conversation so stimulating, that those three minutes a day were worth all the rest.”
Vor grins. “Of course, lady.”
I laugh and he spins me around. Strong arms catch me, pulling me into a firm chest.
I smell him before I look up to see him.
“Darling,” Nolan drawls, looking down at me with mingled displeasure and amusement.
“Husband,” I say.
The next partner goes to catch me at the next spin, but Nolan waves them away. The crew member obeys without question.
“Something,” he says, “is wrong.”
He looks at me patiently. Waiting.
When I don’t answer, he sighs. “Darling, I’m your husband,” he says, and it aches the way he says it, as if I’ve forgotten, as if I don’t have the slightest idea what that means.
He doesn’t intend to be condescending, but his exasperation produces a pang in my chest. I can’t help but wonder if Iaso would have already told him—if she would have found the strength to say the words, to admit the wrong that I cannot.
“We don’t bear burdens alone anymore. We are one,” he says. “Your burdens are for my shoulders, and mine for yours.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, and it comes out in almost a whisper.
The song the band is playing stops, then transitions into a slower, more deliberate cadence. I can’t help but find it sinister, despite that being the furthest from the band’s intent.
“Darling, I want to know what’s happening in that mind of yours,” he says. “I want to follow it down whichever trails it decides to go.”
“You’ll be angry with me,” I breathe.
Nolan cinches his brow. “And what do you believe that would do to us, Darling? If you were to do something that upset me?”
The question is genuine, and there’s pain in the way his gaze rakes my face for an answer. I can’t find it within me, so instead I shut my eyes and place my head against his chest, listening to him breathe, soaking in the fact I no longer feel the rattle of wheezing.
“When I reached the Youngest Sister’s cottage, no one was there,” I say.
“Yes, I’m aware of that little detail,” he responds.
“Except there was your tapestry, strung up on the loom.”
“Did you see something unpleasant regarding me, Darling?” he asks. There’s a gentle chuckle in his voice, but a bit of anxiety, too. His chest tenses underneath my touch.
He’s wondering if I watched from the tapestry what happened in the warden’s office, and I can’t allow him to worry over that lie. “It was the end of the tapestry. You were supposed to die of the illness. It was going to take you that night. I’m not sure how much time we had left.”
Nolan softens, his anxieties over his shame quelled.
“So you rewove it,” he says.
“Yes. I rewove it, but…” I bite my lip, trying to figure out how to explain.
“I thought that in reweaving it, I would have the power over your fate,” I say.
“But when I undid your death and fixed your Mark, something happened. It was as if the ability to change your Fate had nothing to do with what I wove, but the power within the tapestry itself. Once you were healed and your life extended, the tapestry—well, it wove itself.”
“That only seems natural,” says Nolan hesitantly.
“If I wasn’t to die in the Lost Boys’ house, surely there had to be more of my story.
Are you saying you’ve seen my future?” He frowns, taking my chin and lifting it so that I’m forced to look at him.
“Is that what this is about? You’ve seen something unpleasant in my future and you don’t feel I should know about it, and now you’re bearing that burden? ”
I bite my lip and nod. It almost feels like a lie with how little it incriminates me, despite me deserving nothing short of incrimination.
Nolan pauses before saying, “Well, I can’t say I like the idea of knowing what my future holds before it happens. Especially if it’s unpleasant. But I won’t make you carry that on your own.”
“No one should have to know their own future,” I say.
Nolan shrugs. “Plenty of people would disagree. And plenty pay good money to those who have no power, just for the hope of looking behind that particular curtain. What did you see, Darling?”
The music stops, the band taking a break. The wind whisks its way onto the deck, playing with my skirts.
I drop my voice into a low whisper, unable to keep myself from shuddering. “When the tapestry rewove itself, Nolan… it showed you with the Sister.”
Nolan tenses underneath my grasp. “What do you mean by ‘with’?”
“I mean what it sounds like.”
Nolan’s face turns white, drains of color. His cheeks go sallow, his palm clammy where he holds my cheek. And for the first time, I witness something in Nolan I’ve never seen. He takes a step back from me, and the absence of his touch feels as if he’s ripped a piece of my heart with it.
“Nolan, I am so sorry,” I say.
But Nolan’s gaze is far off, distant. He’s looking at me, but through me all the same.
“Nolan, I didn’t mean to?—”
“No, no. I know you didn’t,” he says, though the statement seems rote, his subconscious working from what it knows he should say, as if the real Nolan has no idea what’s coming out of his mouth.
It’s agonizing, watching what I’ve put him through. My mind returns to the men in the parlor and I ponder what my body would do if I were to see my tapestry and find myself chained to one of them.
“You changed your fate before,” I say, though my words sound rushed. “The Eldest Sister was there. She told me you were one of the few who had managed to rip their own tapestry. We can fix this. We can change this.”
But Nolan no longer appears to hear me.
“Nolan, please look at me.”
His eyes—glazed over—snap back into focus, and he takes me in. There’s an anger in his gaze that pierces deeper than the distance. I can’t bear to beg him not to be angry with me, even after he promised to bear this burden with me.
Because it’s not my burden. It never was.
“I’m sorry, Darling,” he says. “But I’m going to need a moment to myself.”
He turns to go, and my heart cracks in two at the idea that Nolan cannot even stand to be in my presence, betrayed as he’s been by his own wife.
“Nolan, please,” I say as I chase after him, grabbing his coat sleeve.
He winces and comes to a halt, craning his neck to peer behind him ever so slightly. He takes his hook and gently removes my hand from his arm.
“Darling,” he says, his voice soft, “I need you to afford me a moment to process this.”
His voice is firm and gentle, but it throbs all the same.
“All right,” I say, my words getting caught in my throat, strangling me.
“We’ll discuss this further once I’ve—” He must not know how to finish his sentence, because he nods curtly and then disappears into the crowd of dancers.
A few of the dancers stop, some making way for him, some grinning and slapping him on the back. Their faces go cold when he hardly responds, and a few of them glance at me.
“What happened?” asks Charlie, at my side instantly.
I watch my husband descend into the belly of his ship. “I ruined his life.”