32. Grace and Freedom
GRACE AND FREEDOM
Cecily collapsed to the deck. Above her, the sunlight was still watery and faded, but at least the sky was blue. The sails fluttered with a weak breeze, proving the unnatural stillness had broken. She shivered as it grazed over the wet clothes clinging to her skin.
A long, warm coat was thrown over her, and then Jack knelt at her side, frantically pushing loose tendrils of hair from her face. “Are you alright? What happened?”
Hester was on her other side, Greyson standing above. As Jack looked on the verge of flying apart, she pushed up to wrap her arms around his neck, comforted by the smell of his skin and sweat.
“You’re alive,” she breathed. “You’re all alive.”
Stede was not.
“Cecily?” Jack pulled back, eyes tense with anxiety as they raked over her face.
Belatedly, she realized she was sobbing.
“Stede,” she croaked, tears burning trails over her cold skin. “I watched it k-kill him. He saved me and it killed him.”
The memory of him swam before her, his face cast in blue light and his kitchen knife clutched in his hand. The way he’d looked at her…he’d loved her too. Now all of him, who he was—his kindness, his warmth—all of it had vanished in an instant.
He’d been the first to give her somewhere to exist in all her brokenness, with no judgment or condemnation. He had asked for nothing in return, and he’d saved her life.
He was dead. He was dead.
Jack swallowed hard, opened his mouth, closed it, then swallowed again. “We lost many,” he said thickly. “But Stede…”
The four of them sat in silence. All around them, pirates cleaned the dead and gore off the deck and scrubbed away the blood. Many had been killed today, but to her, Stede was the greatest.
“I saw your knives,” she said to Jack. “I thought maybe—maybe you were—” She shook her head, trembling. “I had a chance to kill it, and I took it.”
Down in the brig, she knew Fiero would still be alive, having brought this fate on all of them. But whether or not he was dead, Jonah would still come for them.
Hester sat back on her heels. Greyson cursed.
Jack’s voice darkened, his eyes narrowing as he said, “You’re telling me you jumped off the damn ship? I thought you fell.”
She hesitated, trying to determine what was so shocking about this. That thing had killed her friend—their friend.
“It killed Stede,” she told him again, as though he might not have understood the first time.
This did not appease him. “Cecily, you—”
A shadow fell over them, and they both looked up. Copson had approached, and now stood close as he gazed over the water. His voice was low as he asked, “Was that a mermaid?”
“Yes,” Jack answered. Though frustration still burned in his tone, he’d lowered his voice as though it were bad luck to speak of the creature. “It brought her to the ship. After she killed the serpent.”
The captain’s eyes snapped to Cecily. “You killed it?”
Wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand, she rose, shrugging Jack’s coat around her shoulders. “I lost the sword,” she told both Copson and Jack, then grimaced. “I tried to get it back, but the serpent…kept it.”
Copson’s gaze bored into her with what might’ve been either anger or incredible curiosity. “You lost the sword I gifted to my late wife.”
“Yes,” she said, unwilling to offer more. She was already sorry enough for losing the beautiful weapon, and she didn’t have the capacity to weather his mood after all today had brought.
But then a laugh jolted out of him, just a small, short sound. “A sword is a small price to pay for my ship and my crew.”
Even as he laughed, she couldn’t bring herself to feel any better about it. There was something…off…inside her, and she couldn’t figure out what it was, or in what respect.
Perhaps it was only that she’d been underwater for far too long, and her mind was lost on its way back from the verge of death.
Beside her, Hester gasped, “Cecily, your hand!”
Cecily dimly recognized the pain in her palm, which sharpened as she lifted her fist and opened her fingers to reveal three curved, black scales lined with her blood. She plucked them from where they’d cut into her palm, marveling at their opalescent veins of green.
Distantly, she heard Hester ask Greyson to fetch bandages, but Cecily remained wholly focused on the beautiful scales. They were so lovely…
“The mermaid?” Copson guessed, studying what she held.
“He brought me back, but I ran out of breath…” Disbelieving, she said, “He gave me his.”
She didn’t understand why a creature with fangs and soulless eyes would have done such a thing. There was little altruism at sea, and certainly none while angry ghosts chased them.
The captain and first mate traded glances. Then Jack pressed his fingers into his brow and muttered, “Shit.”
“What?” Cecily asked. “What is it?”
“Stay in the sun, Cecily,” Copson said, shifting his weight away. “If you feel any desire to go overboard, don’t.” With a parting glance at Jack, he left just as Greyson emerged from the lower decks with a handful of bandages.
Jack’s eyes were hard as Hester wrapped Cecily’s cuts.
Meanwhile, confusion strengthened its grip on her mind, as though the fog from earlier had weaseled through her ears and into her brain to silence half her thoughts.
Even her little home was shrouded in mist, the door shut tight and the windows dark.
Odd.
“Let’s get you into something dry,” Jack said, pulling her from her thoughts. Hester had finished, and now his hand was on the small of her back, herding her toward their cabin.
It was as though her body moved of its own volition while the rest of her was still in the ocean, searching for the surface. She wandered along the banks of her mind, testing the boundaries of the fog as it rolled against the edges of her thoughts.
Inside their room, Jack stood by the door as she dried and changed into clean clothes. Though her mind wandered, she couldn’t help but notice all her movements felt smooth and languid, so graceful—
“No knives,” Jack said as she reached for her daggers.
She paused, her hand hovering above the belt waiting on the bed. Worry darkened his eyes, and she stared at him, feeling unusually hopeless to understand.
“Have I done something wrong?” she asked.
“No.” He scooped up the weapons. “There are legends and stories about kissing mermaids—”
“I didn’t kiss him.”
“I know,” he said, depositing the knives in the armoire. “I’m not accusing you.”
He locked the armoire. Locked it, like he didn’t trust her.
Was it because she’d killed the serpent? She’d acted on impulse, but that was no reason to take her knives—that was no reason to think she would be unsafe toward him or anyone else.
“Jack, I didn’t… I’m sorry for jumping.” She wasn’t sorry, but maybe it was what he wanted to hear.
She had never particularly cared to indulge him in such ways, but with her spinning thoughts, suddenly she’d tell him anything.
But that had never been their relationship, and she didn’t want it to be, so she buried the impulse and wrapped her arms around herself, pushing against the feeling of powerlessness.
“I didn’t kiss that creature. It wasn’t my fault. ”
“Darling.” Jack was before her again, his hands chaffing her arms. “What happened with the mermaid—”
“I didn’t mean to,” she said, shocked as her voice came as a wail.
She pressed her hands over her face as serpents and scales danced through her thoughts.
She could simply take her knives, but reason and logic chased one another in circles, splashing uproariously through visions of sunlight over sparkling water.
“I’m so confused,” she whimpered. “My head is swimming.”
His sigh sounded so defeated that she looked up.
“You’re getting sick,” he told her gently.
“Siren sickness—it happens after a person kisses a mermaid. Victims fall under a sort of…spell, I suppose, and are driven to become one of them. It’s the nature of those creatures.
They’re like vampires, unable to create more of themselves unless they turn humans. ”
Her voice came as a scared sort of squeak. “Am I turning into a mermaid?”
“Not right now. But as the sickness comes, you’ll be hellbent to throw yourself into the sea.
If you do, only then would it happen.” He rubbed her arm, stroked her cheek, ran his hand over her hair, trying to calm her.
“I only took your knives to make it easier for myself to keep you here. I’ll give them back when you’re better, I swear. ”
She shivered. “For how long?”
“I…” He pursed his lips, his hands still grazing over her sleeves. “I don’t know. I’ve only seen it once.”
“What happened?”
He frowned. “The man was gone the next morning.” With a fervent shake of his head, he assured her, “But that won’t happen to you, so long as you give me a fighting chance.”
She tried to smile, though now that he said it, all she could think was how elegant and soft and lovely it might be to twirl through cool, quiet waters. Biting her lip, she shook the thought loose.
No, she didn’t want the water.
Jack took her hand and pulled her toward the door. “We’ll go back outside. Light and warmth will help.”
She let him tug her toward the open air and the beautiful sea. But despite the sunlight on her skin, her confusion didn’t dissipate through the afternoon, as though bits of her awareness were slipping behind a locked gate, and she couldn’t follow.
The way the captain watched her made her all the more aware of it.
Jack kept her out of the shadows and shade, and he never left her side. No one else seemed aware of her sickness, and she hoped this was the worst it would get.
She could handle this.