29. In which conditions are favourable and flames attract moths
IN WHICH CONDITIONS ARE FAVOURABLE AND FLAMES ATTRACT MOTHS
“The conditions are finally favourable!” Rufus said, licking his plate of beans, anchovies and jugged hare clean, huddled up in his sleeping bag in the tent. “That was delicious. Weird, but delicious. I actually feel full for once.”
As an early Christmas celebration, they had eaten the stores that wouldn’t fit on the sledges.
Winston lay back, a hand on his stomach and his eyes closed. “Finally. We can make a move for open water and get off this wretched ice.”
“Indeed. We’ll set out later on. Now—” But Hester did not get to finish her sentence. The tent flaps ripped open, and Septimus filled the space.
He pointed at her. “You took my spoon. Give it back now. I cannot eat my Christmas dinner.”
Hester let her jaw drop in mock surprise. “I did no such thing.”
Septimus’s eyes dropped to the spoon in her hand.
His spoon.
Well, if he was going to just leave it lying about, she could hardly help taking it.
He snarled and leapt towards her, and she held her plate high and shuffled backwards into Winston.
She’d be damned if he spilt a drop of her bizarre concoction of foodstuffs.
She passed the plate into her bosun’s waiting hands and threw Winston a glare that promised a painful death if he were to eat it.
Hester rolled as Septimus reached for her and then sped out of the tent with him at her heels. The ice sparkled in the noon sun, blinding her. She slipped on a rough patch of ice and skidded, her arms flailing. Septimus barrelled into her, and they both hit the ground.
Hester flipped from her back onto her hands and knees, but he grabbed hold of her by the ankle and dragged her back. She lay on her belly on the ice, the spoon clutched in her outstretched hand.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why do you delight in rankling me?”
“It’s fun,” she panted, kicking her leg in an attempt to get free. The cold crept into her belly. “Perhaps if you weren’t such a serious bore you’d think it was fun too.”
“You are vexing to the highest degree.” He dragged her closer and pinned her wrist down, plucking the spoon from her grip. And he did not let her go, but placed a palm in the centre of her back, pressing her into the ice, lowering his face next to hers.
Despite the cold, heat curled in her stomach. “It is you who is vexing, my lord.”
“Is that so? Then explain to me why your pulse races when I have you helpless,” he growled into her ear. Hester wriggled on the ice, trying to quell the desire that flooded her body. His breath on her ear and the scratch of his beard sent shivers down her spine.
“Merely because I was just running from you. Running increases the heart rate. Didn’t you learn anything in your fancy school?”
He pressed her more firmly to the floe. “I don’t think that’s the only reason. You know it, and I know it. Why can’t you just be honest with yourself?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lie tasted sweet on her tongue.
“Why do you deny the truth?”
Hester gritted her teeth, her cheek pressing uncomfortably into the ice.
His sapphire eyes bored into hers, assessing her, reading her. “I think you’re afraid.”
Hester scoffed, then fell silent as she turned his words over in her head, examining them with a sudden knot in her stomach.
Afraid…
Impossible.
“I fear nothing and no one, and certainly not you. I told you that,” she hissed.
“I don’t believe you are afraid of me, no.” He leant further down, his nose inches from hers. “I believe you’re afraid of us.”
She closed her eyes, as if shutting off that sense would shut off the others, and she wouldn’t be able to hear his accusations. “Us does not exist. How can I be afraid of something that does not exist? That will never exist.”
He let her go, shoving the spoon into his coat pocket, sitting back on his heels. And then he had the audacity to smile at her knowingly.
“Don’t act like I don’t understand you, little witch. I know what I said struck a nerve. You keep coming back, like a moth to a flame. A moth who’s afraid of getting her wings burnt. I’m not going anywhere, you know. Is that what you’re afraid of?”
Her mind reeled, memories flashed of his snarling face as he’d tried to out her as a witch in front of the crews, of his tying her to a chair and threatening to sink the Valour, of him bellowing that he hated her when the Intrepid sank.
And before she could stop the words, she shouted, “But you did! You did go!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, her brows shooting up.
She had not meant to say that. Had not meant to say anything.
But now she’d started she couldn’t stop.
“I let you closer, and I did get my wings burnt. I let you in. I don’t let anyone all the way in, and you pushed me away. ” She bellowed the last words.
His brows bunched together. “You were—or I believed you were—instrumental in the sinking of the Intrepid. I needed space.”
Hester got to her feet and dusted the ice and snow from her coat. He had abandoned her. Abandoned her just as she was letting him in. Just like everyone else. She gave him a withering look and stalked off between the tents.
After stomping around for ten minutes, her heart rate would not settle.
She was afraid of nothing. Had hardened herself over the years of her childhood to need no one but herself, to be utterly independent.
She had been trying to let him in the only way she knew how, and he had shut her out.
And after he had finally forgiven her, she had tried again, only to find that he had undermined her, ordered the lifeboats to be lowered on her own ship. And yet.
And yet.
She had to get out of there. She ran for the sleds and harnessed Snowball and Romeo up, then hopped on and cracked the reins.
Hester raced over the snow, the dogs pulling hard. His words rattled in her head, in her chest.
You are afraid of us.
She didn’t know what to do about the words, or what to feel.
When she could no longer see the camp, she brought the dogs to a halt at the edge of a floe, a few feet of water between it and the next sheet of ice. She knelt at the edge, removed her gloves and pressed her already frozen fingers to the snow.
There was a pain, a longing in her heart.
But she was tired of being abandoned. First by her parents, by Victor, by Fliss, and by him.
The numbness she’d felt on the way here melted, anger rising like a flaming tide, and she wondered that it didn’t melt the ice, so hot and sharp did it feel.
“I am not afraid,” she gritted through her teeth. “Not of him, not of anything.”
“Is that so?” a voice to her left rasped.
She spun, scrambling to her feet, and there, standing on the ice, was a man.
He looked like a Viking god, enormous and stacked with muscle, silver-grey hair down to his chest. But his skin was black as the depths of the sea, blacker than a starless night, with thick white stripes swooping over his brows, thighs and up his stomach.
He was naked, save for strands of kelp slung around his hips.
Hester backed away, spluttering in shock. Was she seeing things now? She pulled her snow goggles onto her forehead. “Who the Hell are you?” But she knew. Had stared at that page of Charlotte’s book of myths often enough.
Devil.
He twirled a familiar-looking harpoon in his hand, and she sucked a breath through her teeth.
“This belongs to you,” he said, words like sandpaper, holding the harpoon out to her. “Would you like it back?”
She shook her head, ice piercing her veins. Her throat seized.
“A wise choice,” he said, smiling widely, revealing small, pointed teeth, white in the blackness of his face.
Hester couldn’t move, her feet like lead. How had he found her? She had no magic left for him to trace her. And she was utterly alone. No one knew where she had gone. Sweat prickled her back.
“You are afraid of me. I can taste it. Delicious. Do come closer.” He beckoned with a black finger.
Against her will, Hester’s feet stepped forwards.
Her pulse quickened. The harpoon was aimed at her heart.
She stopped with the point of it sticking into her breastbone, a cold bead of sweat sliding down the side of her face.
“You are playing with me. Get it over with,” she said, her voice quavering, fists clenched.
He shook his head slowly, an awful smile showing all of his pointed teeth. “You are powerful. More powerful than I realised. What a waste it would be to end you when we could work together. You could melt the ice, drown the world. So many souls for the taking.”
She wanted to scream, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came.
He tapped the harpoon tip to Hester’s heart, and magic flooded into her, replenishing what she had spent all those months ago against the siren.
“Come with me, and I can take the pain away from here,” he said, prodding her chest again.
“I can tell you of your parents, your magic. Aren’t those your greatest desires? ”
How did he know that? How could he possibly know that she lived with the ache in her heart every day. Drowned it out with mischief and madness. She found herself whispering, “Yes.”
After all this time, to know who she was, why she had been left, what the magic was. It was tempting.
“You could tell me?” she asked, wrapping her hand around the harpoon tip.
“I am the Lord of the Underworld, the Punisher of Broken Oaths. I am Orcus. I can tell you anything you wish.” He yanked the harpoon, and she stumbled forwards until her chest almost touched his.
A gust of wind blew from behind, and a female voice spoke, “Do not go with him.”
Hester whipped her head around, still unable to move her feet, and stared in shock at the winged female behind her. The aquiline woman with green eyes.
Orcus snorted. “You abandoned her. Why should she listen to you?”
Hester raked her hands into her hair, tugging on it, her head about to burst. Was she in a nightmare?
She was not.
“It was the only choice!” the woman screeched, anger contorting her lovely face, her wings lifting, golden-brown feathers shining. “What I did kept her safe all this time.”
Safe? Hester shook her head, bewildered. “Who…?” she asked the woman, the only word she could utter as her mind raced.
The woman’s eyes shone with tears, her mouth twisting. “You were once mine.”
Hester’s heart wrenched. The woman’s face. Oh, she knew now why it was so familiar.
The same green eyes, the same freckles on tan skin, the same golden-brown hair.