Chapter 26 Hands That Still the Tide #2
I bite back a sarcastic remark on my earlier exile to the infirmary.
Not that I minded it, but still it’s frustrating to be so obviously kept from her.
Of course Rhyland doesn't trust me. Rightfully so. Married or not, escape from him is paramount. Now it's just a matter of if I should hold out. If there’s a chance he’ll win the Mad Queen's piece.
If I could somehow manage both shards, his and hers, and secure passage back to Ethirya before he caught me… .
Make it right at any cost, save Màma even if I die trying to do it. The thought is as persistent as a blade pressed into my brain.
“You must be hungry,” Rowan chirps. “Davvey Bean, the cook, prepared quite the feast. Mostly the delicious things brought back from Elaris that will spoil if they aren’t eaten soon. Come on.”
She ushers me across the deck and all the while I feel Rhyland’s gaze burning into the back of me. Trailing me. We stop in front of a heavyset pirate, manning a spread of food. His thick eyebrows and hooked nose make me think of a vulture, but he smiles broadly at us.
“Eat yer fill, ladies.” He gestures at the food— familiar fruits, roast bird, steamed vegetables, braided loaves of bread.
It lacks the luster from when I dined in Elaris, but the smell is as rich as it is tempting.
And the reprieve from eating beans and oats and hard tack that is sure to follow in the coming days is enough to make me reach for a plate and pile it high.
One of the twins, Aizen I think, passes by and pushes a mug of rum into my hand as he goes.
I find an empty barrel to perch on and start picking at my meal, taking generous gulps of the strong rum that warms my belly.
Sabre has gone off to force Briggs to dance with her.
Rowan leans into the wall of the forecastle behind me, soaking it all in.
“They're not so bad you know, these pirates,” she whispers.
“Oh?” I raise my eyebrow, taking another deep drink off of the rim of my mug. Was it only a week ago she whispered to me in the wagon about how they were all untrustworthy Vagril? Godless heathens who’d sell us or skin us on a whim.
She bumps my shoulder lightly and grins. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s true. In Helgate they’d have us believe pirates are more monster than human. But they’re just people like you and me, with hopes and ambitions and beating hearts.”
Her words stoke something inside of me—a kindling.
An ember. I can’t help it. My eyes find Rhyland, still perched in the shadows.
His leathers, black as the water below us.
His deep blue gaze, enchanting as pure midnight sky.
He’s so handsome it makes me ache to look at him, but the beauty is a lie.
I know what’s lurking under that skin, held captive by a brand of runes.
Pirate. God. Monster.
I repeat it, over and over. A warning to myself. A reminder I cling to.
“Let’s have a song, Sabre! Something pretty!” a pirate bellows from the gathered circle. It sounds like it could be Tobias, but I don’t know for sure.
“Aye!” the others shout their agreement.
Sabre twirls once, laughing, a sound that’s more haunting than joyful. She lets Briggs go and saunters toward Rowan, a gleam of emotion in her eye that takes me by surprise. I’ve seen that look in the eyes of young lovers walking hand and hand on the streets of Helgate.
“I think we should hear something from Rowan; her voice is the prettiest I’ve ever heard.”
Rowan’s cheeks turn bright red. and I feel my heart squeeze in my chest. Rowan’s voice is lovely, but she’s painfully shy about it, mortified to sing in front of a crowd.
I remember the times the Sister’s tried to force her to when we were young.
They’d try to make her sing evensongs from the Book of Hush, praising the Triple God and Goddess at Temple.
For her, it was the worst form of torture.
“Your voice is just as lovely, Sabre,” she insists with a nervous smile.
“Nonsense, the difference is night and day. Honor our fallen with something soulful and sad.”
“Let me,” I almost growl, shoving my empty cup into the chest of a nameless pirate standing too close. “I have a song for you all. One that will break your heart. Haunt your dreams.”
I’m drunk and riding on the blissful throes of laudanum. There’s no fear of making myself look a fool, only shielding Rowan from the feeling.
Sabre looks at me; her smile turns lean and wolfish. “Go on then, fire nymph, let's hear.”
It takes me a moment to realize the crew’s gone quiet, watching us.
I swallow. My voice isn’t bad—though nothing compared to the nymphs back in Aurorae and certainly not as good as Rowan’s.
I turn to Dorian, who’s perched on the rail near the helm, his feet dangling over the edge.
He’s smaller than I expected, maybe the shortest man here besides young Finch.
His hair is long but bound neatly by a cord at the nape of his neck.
His white sleeves billow in the wind when he shifts his fiddle to rest beneath his goatee covered chin, waiting.
I set my food aside and clear my throat then stand, wiping crumbs off my slacks, gaze sweeping the crowd as I pull at the corners of my mind for a song. A song I heard once in a lonely tavern in the Barrows, sung by a nymph slave bound in iron.
My voice starts low, a haunting melody carried on the salt wind.
“I was born in green pasture, where spring never ends,
Where the rivers run gold and stars mark the bend.
Blossoms in my hair and moss on my skin,
They tore me from home, stole me from my kin.”
I think of Aurorae, her glimmering shores. The eternal spring and ethereal beauty. I hold the picture of it in my head, and push out the next verse, lilting and clear.
“They bound my wrists tight with their silent cruel steel,
Cut out my name so I wouldn’t heal.
The groves they don’t sing, the north winds don’t cry—
The trees turned their faces when I said goodbye.”
I picture the Nymphs stolen from their sacred groves, ripped from their mothers and sisters and daughters, their hearts heavy with sorrow, loss. Their pain, their loneliness, are a pulse within me. A beat that follows the chorus to come.
“Oh, take me back to Aurorae’s fair light,
To wild green hills and that endless lone night.
I’ll sail on the north wind or sink like a stone—
Just let me go back to where I was known.”
Their fear, their longing, it burns bright, goes so deep it's burrowed into the bone. The words twist out of me. High then low. Swollen and clear and so mournful I feel like my own insides are fracturing.
“There’s blood in the water, salt on my breath,
They chained me in shadow, they bartered my death.
But even in silence, I still dream, still cry,
For that laughing green glen and the far gloaming sky.
I promised my sisters, I swore I’d return,
With strong hands unshackled and fire to burn.
But if I can’t walk again her silver kissed shore,
Bury my bones where I danced before.
Oh, take me back to Aurorae’s fair light,
To wild green hills and that endless lone night.
I’ll sail on the north wind or sink like a stone—
But free or forsaken, I'll find my way home.”
In the final verse I weave a thread of hope, remembering how the nymph slave’s voice broke around the words. The promise to return someday to those wanton shores, alive or in spirit. A vow to go home. To be free, one way or another.
Only now, in this moment, do I realize she meant death. Forsaken. That taking her own life would be preferable over living in chains. The thought is a spear, driven deep inside of me.
At some point Dorian had picked up the melody, playing deep and soulful. On some instinct, his notes die away with my ending line and bleed into a silence so potent it's almost eerie before a ripple of applause scatters it apart.
The crew surges forward. Some smear tears off their cheeks, pat my shoulder or squeeze my hand. I look up to find Rhyland's eyes fixed on me, and in their depths a reflection of the despair in my song. And something else, something more that I don't want to see.
My finger slips up to run along the raised rune behind my ear, its new shape foreign, and his voice echoes in my mind as real as the day he spoke the words.
You are mine, Nymph.