Chapter 34 The Reckoning
Sable
An eerie silence settled over the deck as they climbed out of their boat, and Sable frowned, searching the gazes of the crew. They looked troubled. Her shoulders stiffened to see it.
Were they going to kill her for the Heart? Had it somehow reached out to them?
She hadn’t thought it could talk to anyone else while it was in her possession, but she might’ve been wrong about that. The Heart might be twisting their minds right now, goading them all to pounce on her and set free the curse trapped within it.
“What’s going on?” Calla asked, taking a step forward. Her body angled itself ever so subtly to stand between Sable and the crew, as if she were being protective.
Sable’s frown dug deeper. This was new. It made something shift in her stomach, slow and uncomfortable.
She’d always been the first out during a battle–she was supposed to protect her captain, but when Sable moved to step forward, a hand latched onto her own and tugged her back.
Riley, a silent plea in her eyes. For once, Sable stayed put.
She didn’t relax. Her muscles remained coiled, ready to spring, no matter what Riley and Calla thought about needing to shield her.
Sable needed no shielding. She was supposed to be the shield.
Nyxen cleared his throat, drawing her eyes.
A mix of warmth and hurt twisted in her stomach.
She hadn’t been expecting a party or anything upon her return, since she’d been the one to abandon them in the first place, but at least a ‘Welcome back’ and a friendly clap on the shoulder?
She’d expected that. She’d fought and sweated and bled amongst these pirates for years.
And yet now here her crew stood, gathered in a tight, distant semicircle as if the three of them were intruders on their own ship.
Calla was their captain. This was absurd.
“Haddock has been telling us one of his stories,” he started.
A rude scoff at his side interrupted whatever he was going to say next. Sable’s heart clenched in her chest.
“I think it’s all bullshit.”
Kittredge.
She was alive. Sable nearly collapsed on her own feet with the relief of seeing her. Deep inside her, something unhitched, her shoulders going looser. Kittredge was alive. She hadn’t killed her by being too soft, too needy. Thank fuck.
“Even if he’s right, were we really supposed to leave her to rot at the bottom of the sea for us?” Kittredge asked, turning to face the others. “Come on.”
“If that’s what she wanted to do, who are we to stop her?” Thorian, this time.
Sable couldn’t tell if he was joking or just trying to get under her skin.
“Haddock? What’s he got to do with anything?” Riley asked.
Nyxen cleared his throat, preparing to speak again, but the surrounding crowd shuffled and parted, knocking him back to make way for–Haddock.
The old man walked to the front of the crowd, a hush falling all around him.
He didn’t look like a rambling old man anymore.
He seemed… more. He stood straighter. His feet didn’t drag as he walked.
His features had lost all hints of warmth or friendliness.
And his eyes, when they settled on Sable, seemed older than time itself.
They sent a shiver down her spine. Her hand instinctively twitched for her machete, but her hips were bare–she’d abandoned it on the boat, along with Kittredge, back when she’d dived with the Heart. Fuck.
“I’m very disappointed in you,” he said.
His voice sounded different, too. A low timbre that reverberated in her chest like an earthquake.
Powerful. Inevitable. Unstoppable. His eyes flicked to Riley, in the sort of dismissive way someone would look at a rat skittering by their feet.
Sable’s fists clenched to see it. “Not in you, Riley. I didn’t expect any better from you.
But Sable? The captain? I had higher expectations from the two of you.
” He tilted his head at Sable. “You should’ve stayed at the bottom of the sea.
” Then he looked at Calla, who stiffened. “And you should’ve let her.”
“Excuse me?” Calla asked. Her voice, quiet and penetrating and as angry as Sable had ever heard it, made shivers go down her spine. “Who do you think you are, old man?”
Haddock chuckled ruefully, and he started pacing in front of the crowd. The crew remained behind him, feet shuffling, throats bobbing, never meeting Sable’s gaze head-on, as if they agreed with what Haddock had just said but felt bad about it.
“He said,” Pip spoke up, rubbing the back of his neck, “that this was all a test, and that if Sable came back to the surface, then we’d failed it and there’d be no hope left for us. All of us. Like, humans. As a whole. That we’ll always stay selfish and greedy and self-serving and that, uh…”
“That this would be the beginning of the end,” Nyxen finished for him, looking conflicted.
Haddock stopped pacing and regarded the three of them expectantly. What was he waiting for? A fucking apology? Sable would just as soon spit in his face.
“And why, exactly, are you listening to a word he’s saying?” Calla asked mildly, except there was nothing mild about it. The sailors ahead looked increasingly uncomfortable where they stood.
“He knows things,” Eryx said quietly from the crowd. Subdued. “And I feel it. His power. Now that I’m looking. He could turn us to ash if he wanted to.”
Haddock’s lips upturned into a faint smile, as if he was pleased someone on the ship was smart enough to see through his facade.
“Lucky for you, I am willing to give you one more chance,” he said.
He addressed Sable. “Your instincts were right. The Heart will stop at nothing to bring destruction, and your companions are all too weak-minded to resist it. One moment of weakness, of distraction, is all it will take. And you have plenty of weaknesses,” he said, glancing between Riley and Calla, “and distractions. You need to go back where you came from, and we’ll forget any of this has ever happened.
You’ll be hailed as a hero. You can even say proper goodbyes to the crew this time. ”
Haddock was barely allowed to finish before Calla stepped fully in front of Sable, shielding her view of Haddock–shielding her. “Over my dead body,” she said.
The shock of hearing those words was enough for Sable to remain stuck in place, staring.
Haddock’s eyes glinted in the low light of sunset. “That can be arranged.”
“Wait!” Eryx shouted.
They shouldered their way to the front of the crowd, and this was the most unsettled Sable had ever seen them.
Shoulders heaving, a frantic look in their eyes, hands shaking.
They were terrified of what Haddock–the old man who could barely stand upright last time Sable had seen him–could do.
A pit opened up in Sable’s stomach. If Eryx believed it… Well, it was true, wasn’t it?
Are you ready to use me now, Sable? The Heart asked, sounding delighted. I can make him disappear. He’s not more powerful than I am. All you have to do is wish for it.
“Fuck off,” Sable said under her breath.
The answer was instinctive.
But now that she was back here, feeling Riley’s hand in her own, seeing her captain willing to give her own life to protect her, to keep her, Sable found her self-control crumbling between her fingers.
What would it ask in return for this one thing?
She didn’t know that she could repeat the sacrifice she’d been willing to make.
Not a second time. The first time she’d been alone.
The first time Riley and Calla hadn’t been here looking at her, holding her back, showing her that her life mattered just as much as theirs.
Eryx faced Haddock, fists clenching at their sides. “You’re wrong,” Eryx said with such emphasis that it drew shocked looks from the crew. “Being willing to love and protect each other is not selfish, and it doesn’t make us weak. It doesn’t mean we’re not deserving. I can prove it.”
Sable stared at them as if seeing them for the first time.
She hadn’t known what to make of them, because they were young, and had much to learn, and they’d never known how to explain themselves or their instincts, but now the wind ruffled their clothes, their hair, stray locks tumbling over flushed cheeks, and they stood tall before Haddock so fiercely.
They had grown. Both in mind and body and confidence. It was a small wonder to witness.
Everything was a small wonder to witness after Sable hadn’t thought she’d be witnessing anything ever again.
Haddock himself did not look impressed. Mildly intrigued, maybe. “How?” he asked. “You are but a child.”
Eryx took no offense at that. “I suppose we all look like children to you, at your age,” they said.
Riley huffed a laugh at Sable’s side. Eryx did not expect a reply or a reaction before turning from Haddock, bypassing Calla and coming to stand in front of Sable.
“Give me the Heart,” they said. Their request had none of the anxiety Sable had witnessed in the past, when they’d made Riley request the compass in their stead.
They looked her straight in the eye and added, “Trust me.”
Sable did. She did trust them. And so, with everyone looking, she reached into her pocket to fish out the Heart and held it out to them.
The Heart said not a thing. It felt… eager to leave her, because of course it did. It changed hands without so much as a goodbye.
Eryx cradled the Heart in their palms, gazing upon it while the rest of the crew just stared. A small frown etched itself on Haddock’s wrinkled forehead as he, too, waited.
Under everyone’s attentive looks, Eryx eventually lifted the Heart to their face. They opened their mouth and–swallowed it.
Sable blinked.
No one around as much as breathed.
Eryx swallowed the Heart. Their throat bobbed with the movement.
“What the fuck?” she whispered.
For a moment, nothing happened. And then something shifted. Their skin. Their nails. Their hair. They all turned bone white, all color leaching out of them at once. Only their eyes remained a sky-clear blue.
Eryx smiled at Haddock. “The Heart is safe now,” they said. “It can’t hurt anyone.”
Haddock looked horrified. Stricken. And then, slow as the tide rising, his face contorted in fury.
He stumbled a step back from Eryx, holding his hands out as if he was–afraid?
“You’re an abomination,” he snarled. The wind picked up around them with the harsh sound of his breathing, slapping the sails above their heads.
Making the wood groan. The skies darkened with thunderclouds in little more than a blink.
“You and the rest of this crew. There’s nothing for you but death. The world will be better off for it.”
He raised a hand up toward the sky, and he brought it down with a powerful slap against the deck.
The wood splintered. Above, the sky answered with a crack so loud as if the entire world had just broken.
Sable had to shield her ears from the sound, and so she couldn’t shield her eyes from the blinding light that followed.
Fire.
Screaming.
The cold shock of water against her skin, inside her lungs.
And then nothing.