Chapter Twenty Cecilia #2
“Or what?” Cecilia replies. Her hunger is making her reckless.
More than that, Seymour is not wielding whatever power she has been granted with confidence.
She holds her hand away from her, as though she is fearful of what it might do.
If Cecilia had it, she would be standing tall.
She steps closer. Seymour shakes her head, like a mother disappointed in her child.
“Do not mistake my caution for cowardice,” she says.
She closes her palm over the divine power, squeezing it in her fist. Cecilia readies herself for some blast of pain, but nothing happens.
She begins to laugh – at Seymour, but mostly at herself and her crew and court, for being taken in by Seymour’s tricks.
She has no power. Maybe the bordweal is acting strangely, but this woman has nothing but a fool’s bag of japes.
Cecilia could almost admire the audacity of it.
Seymour holds Cecilia’s gaze, her fist still closed.
Another lighting strike shoots from the bordweal and scatters sparks across the deck.
Cecilia ducks to avoid them. At first, she thinks it is the sparks making the deck shake.
Then she realises that something else is the source of the vibrations.
Something deeper in the bowels of the vessel.
Her laughter dies on her lips as she witnesses Seymour’s quiet triumph.
A brief silence follows the trembling, in which something clatters up the stairs. The panther, covered in splinters from its wooden cage, bounds into the open with powerful grace. Some fool must have released it, Cecilia tells herself. This cannot be Seymour’s doing.
The panther ignores the captain, sprawled on the boards, clutching his face and moaning, and turns its attention to Cecilia.
The creature knows the woman who threatened it and its mistress.
Cecilia turns her wooden dagger towards it.
Another tremble shakes the boat, and the panther splays its paws like a colt, its advance halted.
A shout comes up from below, and the cowards who had fled down now erupt upstairs.
“The ship is collapsing!” Florin shouts.
He sees the panther and runs towards Cecilia.
Perhaps he intends to perform some ridiculously noble sacrifice like placing himself between her and it, as if she would swoon at such a gesture.
But he never reaches her. Like the molten mountain of Perfugi itself, the boards of the ship crackle, buckling up and in and out in a wave that flows up the side of the vessel and along the deck.
As though a fist had closed around the ship and were squeezing it tight.
“Impossible,” Cecilia whispers.
“Is it?” Seymour says.
The deck disintegrates around Cecilia, and she tumbles into the heaving sea below, bodies and boat tossed around her. The cold is a punishment. She looks for an intact piece of wood and finds one a little way away. Two men are clinging to it. She splashes over to them, clumsy in her drenched gown.
“Let go,” she orders them. They ignore her.
She curls her legs around one of them. One arm she clamps around his neck.
The other she uses to plunge her nails into his eye.
The man screams and releases the plank. Cecilia lets go of him and takes hold of the wood, washing the blood and jelly from her fingers.
She looks over at the other man. He is staring at her, face pale, mouth a perfect bread roll.
“Let. Go.” She repeats. He throws himself back, away from her, and she pulls herself onto the wood, letting it take the weight of her torso.
The hunger has returned. If Seymour truly commanded the bordweal to destroy a warship, then Cecilia must have her power. Nothing else matters.
She searches for the woman and the panther among the wreckage, but she already knows that they are unlikely to be there.
Seymour would not have destroyed herself with the ship.
Sure enough, Cecilia spies them just beyond the bordweal.
The shape of the vessel she had seen before is clearer now, the sigil of the Feorwa Isles on the wind-blown flag.
Someone is throwing a harness down to Seymour.
She ties the harness around her panther’s belly and the beast is hauled aboard.
Seymour is next, a dozen arms reaching for her.
Cecilia watches the scene with a curious emptiness.
An emptiness she always feels in the face of the strangeness of commoner families.
She toes off her boots and abandons the wooden plank, swimming towards the ship.
They have not yet pulled up the anchor. She grabs hold of the rope, fighting the waves and her sodden gown to heave herself up, hand hold by painful handhold.
The fibres scour her palms but still she climbs.
There’s a small window a little way above her.
She levels with it, panting and wincing against the salt in the fresh wounds on her palms, and uses her elbow to smash the glass and then to bend the lead latticework.
If she can tear the bottom of her gown off, she should be able to slip inside to safety.
“Oh look, a rat has stowed on board,” a voice says from above her head.
A Feorwan sailor with cropped hair and a rounded face looks down at Cecilia. Next to them stands Seymour.
“I am worth more to you alive than dead,” she shouts, hoping they can hear her above the sea spray.
“You’re worth trouble, is what you are,” the sailor says. Cecilia looks to Seymour.
“Remember that I know my brother,” she calls.
“Fuck you,” the sailor says. “And fuck your brother.” They swing an oar towards Cecilia’s head, and the last thing she knows is the crush of the plank on her cheek, and the sting of the sea, and then nothing.