Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Just as he said the name, a deep rattling cough wracked my body and sent a torrent of pain burning in my chest and shoulder. I clutched at them both like I could keep myself from tearing in two as the fit progressed.
Silas had me sent back to the brig with a warm cup of tea and a blanket.
Four days on the Mourning Star and I still hadn’t slept properly.
Nightmares about cliffs and retreating sails plagued me.
The damned eerie green lantern-light leeched the warmth from everything it touched, and no matter how I angled myself on the brig bench, the light found my eyes.
Then there was my dislocated shoulder. So far, I’d been too much of a pussy to reset it myself, leaving it swollen and throbbing past the point of my pain tolerance. It made sleep nearly impossible. When I did sleep, it was because my body forced a shut down.
I’d finally been hired to find the Stella Mortis, something I’d been searching my whole life for, without August looking over my shoulder, and I was almost too near death to do it.
The notes spread across the brig floor represented approximately thirty hours of working through pain and fever. I had no memory of doing any of it. My cough had become deep drags from the bottom of my chest and wracked my whole body, leaving my throat and lungs burning after the fits.
Just as I thought it, another violent one began.
I pressed my fist to my sternum and waited for it to pass, eyes on the star progression I’d scratched out by lantern-light around three in the morning.
The ecliptic line down his spine, broken up by a missing piece in the center, had been bothering me since the first session.
It was eleven degrees off true north, which shouldn’t have meant anything on its own.
But when cross referenced with the outer planet positions clustered near his left shoulder blade, it meant the map wasn’t just pointing to a place.
It was pointing to a time.
A specific astronomical alignment, narrow enough to miss if you weren't looking for it. One that came around once every few decades and lasted three days at most. I hadn’t told this to Silas.
Partly because I wanted to be certain. But mostly because the moment I handed him something concrete, I’d have nothing left with which to barter.
I needed to get out of this godsdamned brig.
I feared I wasn’t going to make it to another session if I didn’t.
The cold had seeped all the way into my bones and created a chill that I couldn’t chase away even in the warmth of his quarters.
He’d come get me soon to work, and I was looking forward to it despite myself.
Something had shifted over the last few days.
There were less interrogations and rude remarks, and more silence as he let me work.
He stopped standing so far away and let me get close enough to document the map in real detail, to discern what was a legitimate mark and what was a freckle or unrelated scar.
Silas had stopped waiting to take his shirt off and now started our sessions seated, his torso bared and ready, when Finch brought me.
Until yesterday when, for some odd reason, he came to gather me himself.
After I charted everything that my foggy brain could, I put the parchment on the desk and we studied it together. The heat rolling off him when he leaned in close enough to smell the whiskey on his breath stopped all processing in my brain.
I said something about Cassiopeia’s positioning relative to the solstice and he almost smiled.
The corner of his mouth had moved. I averted my gaze back to my notes to hide the shiver down my spine.
Then his mask of menace had slipped back over his face and he looked at me like I was a peasant who floundered their way into a palace.
Now, the door at the top of the steps opened, and my shoulder throbbed as I turned to face—
“Miss Godwin.”
Silas.
My breath caught behind the cough building in my throat. I cleared it away as best I could, before saying, “You’re late.”
He looked at the notes covering the floor, then at me, and said nothing for long enough that silence became a touch awkward.
Had my dress become askew? Was my hair stuck up in a wild manner?
I suppressed the urge to check. I didn’t need to look good for him and even if something inappropriate was showing, I would own it.
“You look terrible,” he said finally.
Ah.
“Well, perhaps if you’d allow me a bath and a warm place to sleep, I would look good enough to grace your presence,” I snapped back.
He said nothing to that, only looked at me like I was a problem and he couldn’t decide if solving me was worth the effort.
This damned man.
When the gate creaked open, he stood there and looked at me for a long moment before he spoke. “Are you going to gather your notes, Miss Godwin?”
I scowled, because of course he wasn’t going to be gentleman enough to help.
I gathered the most critical pages off the floor, which took longer than it should have.
Bending over sent the room titling one direction and straightening sent it tilting back.
My shoulder screamed with each movement, and it took all I had to withhold the grunts and whines building in my chest. I tucked the pages under my arm and walked through the opening without looking at him.
The crew dissolved as we passed, finding rigging to inspect and ropes that urgently needed coiling. A few even crossed themselves.
The deck air hit my lungs and the cough took me before I could stop it.
I bent forward, one hand braced with the papers on my knee as the other covered my mouth.
I closed my eyes and tried not to cry through the sting.
When it stopped and I pulled my hand away, a spattering of blood covered my palm.
Silas turned around, and I hid the hand behind my back. I’d be damned if I let him see just how bad off I really was. I’d promised him that I’d die out of pure spite, and I wasn’t a woman who broke promises.
“I’m fine,” I said before he could speak.
He looked me over for a moment, then turned back around and kept walking toward his quarters.
In his cabin, the dawn’s rays spilled through the porthole in a pale column, glinting off the dust motes that drifted in the space between his desk and the window.
The gold trim around the door threw a line of a thin amber light across the floorboards that hadn’t been there previous days. Or, perhaps I simply hadn’t noticed.
My chair was already pulled from the desk.
He tugged his shirt over his head before dropping it on the floor.
I spread my pages flat and tried to look at them rather than him.
My traitorous eyes, however, had different plans.
They watched the tight ropes of muscle in his back flex as he moved.
His latissimus dorsi was big enough to grip while underneath—
“Fuck, Corynne, you stop it right now,” I hissed under my breath.
“Did you say something?” he asked as he pulled his stool to me and sat with his back to me.
“I, uh, the ecliptic line,” I mumbled and cleared my dry throat.
“It’s not just a location, rather it’s pointing to a date.
” I smoothed the top page of my notes with my palm, pressing out the creasing with a trembling hand.
“A specific alignment with a three-day window at most. Every serious astronomer who’s written about the Stella Mortis has been looking for a fixed point.
I believe it doesn’t have one, but moves with the alignment.
If you miss it, it’s gone again. That’s why no one has found it. ”
What I didn’t say was that I wanted the artifact just as much as he did.
If that’s what it was, anyway. No one quite knew what the Stella Mortis was or what it could offer.
It was an item of myth and legend, the properties of its magic changing with each story passed down through the generations.
No matter its abilities, if I could find and prove it, I’d be able to live a life of my choosing and not someone else’s.
Silence stretched. Beneath us, the sea shifted and sent patterns of light dancing across the wooden planks on the floor.
“You’re certain?” he asked.
“I am always certain.” I reached out without thinking, my finger finding the curve of the scar, tracing the line of it from mid-spine downward. “The angle here, if you follow it all the way—”
Silas was across the room before I finished the sentence, back against the far wall, chest heaving. I sat stock still, my hand still raised, afraid that if I made any sudden movements, the beast in front of me would lunge.
“I was only showing you,” I whispered. Was he upset that I touched him?
“Don’t,” he growled, and my hand lowered of its own volition. The chill in my bones crept back in, settling into my shoulder and chest as they ached with the beat of my heart. “Get out,” he said, low and menacing.
“I’m sorry—”
“Get out!”
The cabin swayed beneath my feet when I leaped up.
Head swimming and stomach churning, I tried to understand what was happening.
Cold spread from my chest all the way down to the tips of my fingers and toes.
I reached for the desk to steady myself as he yelled again, but my hand found only slick pages.
It slipped, and I cried out as my ribs caught the sharp edge of his desk before I hit the ground.
“Miss Godwin?” I heard him say. It was like his voice was underwater. Storm-grey eyes appeared above my own and black spots danced in my vision, threatening to overcome them. “Corynne!”
The green light from the lantern waved with his brown locks, and then there was nothing at all.