A blind man is blind
But he sees so much more
~ Annaca
When I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling of the treehouse, I was devastated.
A whole night’s sleep and… nothing. No dreams. I turned my head to see Dahlia sleeping beside me, wholly unmoving, her hand clutched in mine and cold as ice.
Near the wall, Aeris was curled into a tight ball on a pile of blankets, staring unblinkingly at Dahlia.
Judging by the heavy bags under her eyes, she did not sleep at all.
I rose with a groan, scrubbing my face with my hands and trying to prepare for what I might discover that morning.
“You didn’t dream,” Meridan said. “Not once.”
“How do you know?”
“I would have heard your breath change. Your pulse. Your eyes would have moved. You didn’t dream.”
She pulled her knees to her chest like a frightened child. Beside her was a plate with a dried piece of bread and a cut of meat that looked to have been sitting there for hours.
“Lyla said Akareth wouldn’t allow me into…
whatever it is he has Dahlia trapped in.
” I leaned forward, burying my face in my hands for a second with a raspy sigh.
“I don’t know how to fix this, Meri,” I whispered, the realization cutting me right down the middle.
“I don’t know how to wake her. I don’t know how to fight something that I can’t see.
” Panic gripped me, running a cold blade down my spine like a threat.
“Perhaps we were foolish to think we could save her. We should have run like Nazario and Aeris. We should have gone inland. We—”
Meridan rose up abruptly, her hands in fists at her sides. “Dahlia does not run.”
“She’s been running since we met. Every time she comes to me, she’s running from him. When she stays out of the water, she’s running. It’s all she’s been doing. It is her sole focus. She cannot even tell me she loves…” I paused, taking a breath.
“She is brave,” Meridan said through her teeth.
“Yes.” I rose from the bed to face her. “She is. Which is why I know she’s still in there and that whatever is happening, she’s enduring. But I don’t know how to wake her.”
Meridan’s lip quivered as if she was about to weep.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and paced the room, wishing I could be sifting through ideas, but I didn’t even have ideas to sift through.
I could run a person through with my cutlass or blow a hole through someone’s chest with a pistol, but I couldn’t find someone being held captive by their dreams.
I turned to head for the door.
“Just…” a small voice caught me. I stopped and turned back to see Meridan staring down at Dahlia, her hands squeezing the hem of her shirt. “Don’t stop trying. Please.”
“Meri.” She looked up at me, small specks of glowing freckles pulsing on her cheeks. “I will never stop trying.”
She pressed her full lips together, her fingers still toying with her shirt, and then inched forward.
I didn’t quite understand what she was doing, but the pitiful hunch in her shoulders told me she didn’t quite understand either.
Dahlia was her everything and I couldn’t fathom what she was feeling having to watch her lay there on the bed, practically deceased.
I went out on a limb and extended my hand to her, placing it on her shoulder in invitation and, as if I’d knocked a cane out from under her, she stumbled forward into my arms.
I had not spent as much time with Meridan over the months.
She seemed to gravitate toward Mullins when she wasn’t fastened to Dahlia’s side, but she was an important member of my crew.
She was important to Dahlia, too, and to feel her quivering in fear against my chest after I’d seen her rip a man apart countless times was a painful realization that we were all helpless.
No matter how fierce we were in the waking world, we were nothing against the power of what I now knew was far beyond what we could fully comprehend.
“Stay with her,” I whispered.
“I would not be able to leave her side if I tried,” she said.
She slowly stepped away, taking a deep breath and tucking her silvery hair behind her ears.
“I will have Billy bring you fresher food later.”
I walked out into the late morning air. The wind was blowing the overly sweet smell of the hemsbane crops from further inland toward the clearing. It wasn’t the most pleasant scent to wake up to, but it beat rot and salt.
The first thing I did was head toward Lyla’s corner of the camp. Her prison. Mullins sat on a barrel beside the cage while Cathal snored nearby, his head propped on a sack of dried beans. Mullins stood when he saw me, his eyelids heavy. He was in dire need of sleep. Everyone was.
“She seems to go still now and then, but as soon as I go to check if she’s awake, she moves,” he said.
I glanced past him to see Lyla sitting against the bars staring out into the brush like a starving wolf eyeing a wounded fawn.
“I’m assuming Dahlia didn’t,” he said solemnly. “You know… because she’s not with you.”
“No,” I said. “She’s dead asleep.” I slowly moved past him and lowered myself into a crouch in front of the bars. Lyla didn’t even bother to look at me. Why would she? “Will this kill her?” I asked, dreading whatever answer I may or may not get out of her. “Is that what he wants?”
She didn’t nod or shake her head or even blink. I stroked my chin, unsure what to do with my hands besides throw them around her neck and break it. I rose up again and pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth, denying it the freedom to say more when it did not seem to matter.
Torture would not work. Waiting would cost too much.
Killing her would be pointless. I slowly swung my gaze through the camp to see Aeris standing at the edge of the pool beneath the small waterfall, her bare feet barely touching the shore.
She was lit up by the golden rays of the sun like a damn phoenix.
Her hair was bright as fire and her teal dress flowed in the breeze like silk.
I turned and began heading her way. My steps were silent, but she sensed me anyways and graced me with an overthe-shoulder glance.
I skimmed the ground and then her bare feet and the precise way she stood with them together, confined to a small space.
“I was precisely instructed by one of your men not to venture further than the clearing,” she said. “I can smell the hemsbane.”
I nodded. “Good.”
Crossing my arms, I took a place beside her and stared at the sunlit water. The mist of the waterfall was thin, but it reached us, cooling my feverish skin.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Aeris muttered.
“Dahlia is not lost.”
“I know. I meant the old man.”
“Right,” I chuffed. “I suppose I’m used to one tragedy being overshadowed by the next. He was a good man, Gus. Death overlooked him one too many times, I suppose, and finally remembered his time was up.”
“Nazario had lost someone the day we met. He had the same sadness. And also the same will to move on.”
“Your captain sounds like a good man.”
“He is. And so are you.”
“I am not a good man,” I said with a subtle smirk, glancing at the water creeping up to the toes of my boots. “I am less kind than most.”
“Nazario said the same. But good men are not kind. Good men fight when all odds are against them, especially for those they love. All odds are against you, Vidar, and yet you fight when others would have given up.” Our eyes met and I felt an immediate calmness move across my chest. “I know you love her. It’s the most obvious thing to me. ”
I swallowed, feeling my armor start to chip and crack around me. “And yet I am at a loss. I would fight armies for her, but how do I fight something I cannot see? Something I cannot run through with my blade?”
She blinked, taking in a deep, silent breath. “Why did you come to talk to me?”
I glanced back to see Nazario watching us from one of the campfires as he bathed himself with a rag and a pail of water.
“Would your captain be alright with me asking a favor, of you?”
“It depends on the favor I’m afraid.”
I rubbed some tension from my forehead with a sigh, placing a hand on my hip.
“She has answers,” I said. “But I only know one way to get answers from someone and it’s proven ineffective.”
“You want me to speak with the Kroan.”
I locked eyes with her again, apologizing for a request I never voiced.
Instead of shrinking from it, Aeris stared back at Lyla and then began making her way toward her like she was heading to speak with a friend.
I followed, catching Nazario in my peripheral tossing on a clean shirt and then marching in our direction.
Mullins was mid-yawn when I returned. I placed a hand on his shoulder and shoved him away.
“Check on Meridan,” I said. “And get some sleep.”
His eyes flitted between me and Aeris before he nodded and stumbled off. “Right.”
“Munequita,” Nazario said, coming to intercede.
Aeris slowly knelt down beside the cage and curled her fingers around the bars.
Lyla didn’t give her a glance, even when she reached into the cage and gently unbuckled the leather gag from her head, letting it slide off her face and into her lap.
Once she was free of it, Lyla’s gaze tracked the retreat of Aeris’s hand as she slowly pulled it back like she was thinking about biting it off.
As if she knew how she was making everyone nervous, she smiled up at me, showing the sharp teeth she would have used if that was her plan.
“I know you are angry,” Aeris said, her tone sweet and breathy. The kind of voice that could lull a soldier plagued by nightmares into a peaceful sleep. “Even you cannot hide that. But you are desperate, too. Like all of us.”
“Desperate to get out of here and slice you all to bits,” Lyla said.
“If that is the lie you wish to tell,” Aeris shrugged. “It is your own breath you’re wasting on it.”
Lyla’s smile flattened. I wrapped my fingers around the butt of my pistol and Nazario, realizing my caution, stepped in closer to his little siren. Lyla noticed every single movement like a hawk watching a mouse.
“Pathetic,” she hissed. “The way you all clamor about like fools.”
“They don’t want you to hurt me is all,” Aeris said.
“A little Yri like you? What purpose do you serve? I could kill you with one bite. You’re weak.”
“The ability to kill does not determine someone’s worth.”
“Doesn’t it? You’re all killers here, on a journey to destroy something. What are you worth in that case?”
“You’re confused.”
“Oh, yes. Your kind did like to pretend they could feel the emotions of others.”
“Your sister is suffering a great deal. And the ones who love her suffer as well in her absence.”
She chuckled. “I know. I saw it. She is in anguish. Akareth is having a wonderful time with her.”
I envisioned my feet growing roots. It was all I could do not to lunge and bleed her dry.
“Do you love him? Akareth?” Aeris asked.
“I would do anything for him.”
“But do you love him? Does he love you? Would he care at all if one of these men cut off your head and tossed it into the sea?”
“I don’t need his love. It’s rather silly that you all covet such a useless emotion. Dahlia, especially. She’s become so soft. Much softer than I ever was.”
“And you left her there, in her nightmares,” Aeris continued. Lyla met her eyes again, all traces of her mad amusement shattered. I watched Aeris’s shoulders slump a little like she’d been offered disturbing news. “You didn’t leave her there,” she whispered.
The two exchanged a long stare like something was being said between them that we could not hear.
Then Aeris straightened as if trying to recompose herself, but everything about her seemed uncomfortable.
She sniveled and Nazario took another step as if he was about to scoop her up in his arms and run away.
“What’s wrong, little one?” Lyla muttered.
“I don’t like being close to you,” Aeris admitted. “No one should feel what you’re feeling.”
“What do you know of what I am feeling?”
Aeris jolted to her feet and right into Nazario’s waiting arms.
“You are hateful,” she said urgently. “And angry. And you are so incomplete. There’s… there’s so much of you missing. And… and if Dahlia perishes to whatever madness has taken her, you will only suffer more. Because—”
“Stop,” Lyla said through her teeth, her skin immediately turning ashen, black veins framing her even blacker eyes.
“Because there is a part of you that was glad you found her,” Aeris kept on. “You were glad to find your sister. That is why you’re confused.”
Lyla suddenly lunged at the bars, shaking the whole cage. Aeris leapt back and turned into Nazario’s chest so he could wrap her in his embrace.
“Maldita bruja,” Nazario cursed, spitting on the sand.
Only then did Cathal wake to the spectacle happening around him. He sat up, blinking profusely. Nazario hissed and began to walk Aeris away when she reached out and gently clutched my wrist, pulling me toward her.
“She’s all wrong,” she whispered. “All twisted up.”
“You should kill the witch,” Nazario added. “She is a plague on all of us.”
There was a loud voice in my head telling me to do just that.
It was screaming at me, but I couldn’t. Not when Dahlia had yet to wake.
My gut had steered me wrong in the past. So had my head and even my heart.
I turned back toward Lyla. Maybe it was better to kill her.
To end it and unburden ourselves with her presence.
She was not aiding in waking Dahlia anyways, so what was her purpose outside of having insight into Akareth that she was unwilling to give up?
I ran my hands down my face with a groan. Cathal was sitting on a barrel, raking his fingers through his shaggy, red hair.
“I’ll be watching her for a bit,” I said to him. “Get yourself some food.”
“Aye,” he nodded, standing and making his way toward Boil, who was cooking what smelled like a bland potato stew over a fire.
Taking Cathal’s place on the barrel, I stared into Lyla’s cage, right into her monstrous gaze.
I had never been a man who pleaded for anything.
Begging wasn’t in my nature, but at that moment, with hopelessness growing like a weed inside me, I was nearly prepared to drop on my knees and beg for a way to bring my Dahlia back from whatever hell she’d been pulled into.
If only there was a sliver of a chance it would work.