Chapter 5 All Concerns are Noted #2
I supposed it was now or never. One of the many lessons Sebastian Flynn taught me was the less people who knew a plan, the less risk of it being foiled. Each person knew only enough to get us here.
“Dilly?” I asked, never taking my eyes from the island.
This close, there was no escaping the pull of her if she decided to dive. However, from the research Dilly could gather, she preferred moonlight to sleep by, and this particular night of the moon cycle was a particularly favorite spot. Hundreds of years of hearsay and sightings led us here.
“The Dragon Tree is said to be descended from the Greek myth of Hercules, where he slew a serpent-like dragon whose blood created the tree. Of course, there are many dragon trees throughout the world, but this one is said to be the first.”
“I need you to harvest it, Emille,” I said.
Emille swallowed hard, throat working.
“What am I harvesting it for, Captain?” he asked.
I tilted my head, meeting his stare. “I’ll need at least two vials.”
He nodded, eyes searching mine.
“I’ll do it, but I’ll also remind you that I am a healer, Captain. Flynn never asked me to take a life, and I would request the same courtesy from you,” he said.
The night pulled around him, demanding the gods above and below witness this moment. I could lie to him. Half-truths painted in pretty lies. It would be easy, but I owed Emille a life debt, and that required honesty.
“I’ll take many lives with it if I have to, but it would be a less painful death than the alternative. Either way, their lives are marked for death if my warnings are not heeded.” I said.
I could feel Val, Inu, and Dilly’s eyes on me while Emille scanned the island, searching.
When Emille turned back to me, there was resignation in his dark eyes that were usually creased with laughter lines.
I never understood how he found joy despite the loss of his wife and daughter.
Once he’d told me the words inscribed over his pirate’s mark meant bury the dead, but don’t carry them. A lesson from one Sebastian Flynn.
“Neither of them would want this for you,” he said, reaching out and taking my gloved hand.
“But they aren’t here. Mine aren’t ready to be buried yet,” I said.
His hand tightened over mine, squeezing once, then twice. He knew what was at stake.
“I’ll do this for you, but not again,” he said.
I nodded.
I knew Inu, and I were thinking the same thing. This was the last one, but it had to count.
“Ready to risk certain death on a giant turtle?” Val asked with a wide grin.
I could have sworn there was a groan from deep in the ocean that said this was a terrible idea.
Docking the boat, we all held our breath, waiting for the creature to take offense and submerge. Five seconds, ten seconds, a minute went by.
We all took a collective breath, and I stood, knowing I should be the first. The boat rocked with the shifting weight, and before I realized what was happening, I fell backwards and slammed into Emille, who caught me with a boisterous laugh.
Heat colored my cheeks as I fought to push myself off him and salvage what dignity I had left.
“Well, if it slept through that, a nice little walk on its back shouldn’t bother it,” Val said as she stood and hopped onto the island with an annoying amount of grace.
“Coming, Princess?” she said.
I could practically hear the delight radiating from the words. I grunted and shooed away Emille’s offered hand.
Notorious pirate and still falling on my arse. Billy would have loved that.
The moment my feet touched what by all accounts felt like solid earth, I knew why this mattered.
The sooner I got my brother and my pirate back, the sooner I could lay down this mask and just be a clumsy rich girl again.
I just wished I could make myself believe it.
The ground was warm.
Not hot like sand under sun, but pulsing. Breathing. A slow rhythm beneath the soles of my boots that matched no tide I’d ever known.
“Life pours from it,” Inu murmured, crouching low and pressing her palm flat against the mossy surface.
“Delightful,” Val said. “Remind me again why I didn’t stay on the ship and drink myself to death?”
“Because you wanted to see if the sea gods favored fools,” Dilly said under her breath. Her voice trembled despite her wit.
The air shifted. Salt and something older—iron, ash, and the faint sweetness of rot—breathed up from the cracks in the shell. A sound followed, low and deep, like a bell tolling underwater.
“Was that—?” Emille began.
“Yes,” Dilly said, too fast. “And before anyone asks, it wasn’t wind. Aspidochelones exhale through the fissures in their carapace when they dream. If she wakes—”
“She won’t,” I said. “Not tonight.”
She couldn’t.
The moonlight spilled over the island’s crest, silvering the strange, twisted trees that crowned its back. From afar, they’d looked like coral reefs petrified mid-motion, but up close their bark was a deep, burnished red—bleeding sap that shimmered in the dim light.
“The Dragon Tree,” Dilly whispered, reverent again. “Gods preserve us. It’s real.”
It was smaller than I expected, gnarled and bent like it had been growing under the weight of eternity, but the color—blood and ember mixed—glowed faintly from within its trunk. The ground around it shimmered faintly, damp with a dark residue that wasn’t water.
Emille stepped forward with slow, deliberate care, every motion a prayer. He knelt beside the roots, opening his leather satchel and drawing out two glass vials.
“Make sure it does not touch your skin, Emille,” Dilly said, voice quiet, but firm. “You will have to be precise with your cuts. Blunt force will destroy it.”
Emille didn’t ask why. He knew we only ever knew what we needed to know on this crew. That he still pulled out his scalpel said a lot about his faith in Dilly and me.
I watched him work, hands steady despite the enormity of what we were doing.
He cut through the bark with a surgeon’s precision.
Each stroke enough to gather, but not to do damage.
That was the risk of harvesting a Dragon Tree.
Unless one had the skill to gather the sap, it would dry up before one drop slipped by.
The others stood silent—Inu scanning the horizon, Val picking at her blade hilt, Dilly chewing her lip raw. I could feel the pressure building inside my chest, the kind that came before a storm broke or a heart shattered.
The air throbbed again.
Not wind. Not wave.
A heartbeat.
“Rose,” Inu said quietly. “The ground’s moving.”
I turned.
And then I heard it. A groan from the deep, like the earth itself remembering pain. The moss underfoot rippled, and the “island” shifted.
“Faster, Emille,” I hissed.
He didn’t answer, too focused on drawing the sap—thick as blood—from the cut in the tree’s trunk. It filled the first vial halfway before the ground lurched again.
“Captain,” Val barked. “We need to go—now.”
“Not until we have both,” I said, though my pulse roared in my ears.
Failure now was not an option. Not when we were this close. If Dilly was right about the dragon blood, then I would be able to make one last move that would haunt any ship captain bold enough to step into the ocean that now belonged to me.
Another tremor rolled through the shell, stronger this time. The air around us thickened, vibrating with a low hum that came from below. Dilly’s map fluttered out of her hands, caught by a wind that didn’t belong to this world.
“She’s waking,” Dilly gasped. “By the stars, she’s waking—”
“Then we’d best not keep her waiting,” Emille said.
Emille corked the second vial just as a fissure split open near the base of the Dragon Tree, releasing a burst of steam and something like a sigh. The moss rippled outward in concentric circles.
I grabbed his arm and yanked him back toward the boat, shouting over the rising sound—a sound like mountains grinding together.
“Move!” I ordered.
We ran. Val’s laughter echoed like a dare to the gods, Dilly clutching the map to her chest, Inu pulling Emille forward as he stumbled. The air thickened, humid and choking. Beneath the waves, something vast stirred.
The moonlight fractured on the water’s edge as the island began to sink.
We leapt the last few feet, hitting the boat hard enough to nearly capsize it. Val shoved off with her oar, and I snatched the other, rowing with everything I had left. The sea roared its discontent, waves rolling outward from the creature’s descent.
We rowed because anything else meant death.
A groan split the air, and a massive wave rolled under us, dragging us further out to sea, like the mysterious creature didn’t want to harm us either.
My heart beating outside my chest, I clutched the edge of the boat while it tilted and creaked with the pressure beneath it.
And then—silence.
The water smoothed, eerily calm. Only the moon remained, a pale coin above an unbroken mirror.
“We’re alive,” Dilly whispered.
“What a shame,” Val said, wiping salt spray from her face.
Alive. We were alive. Against all odds.
Emille held up the two vials. They glowed faintly, as if they too were alive.
I exhaled, shaking. “Get them sealed and hidden,” I said.
Val leaned back, hair plastered to her face, and let out a low whistle. “You’re mad, Captain. Utterly mad. Much more so than Bash ever was.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Probably why he is in a cell, and I am not.”
Dilly’s voice trembled, soft and hollow. “We just survived an aspidochelone’s descent.”
I looked back over my shoulder at the still sea. The water seemed to breathe once more, a pulse beneath its stillness.
Too easy. I couldn’t help but feel like that last wave was a lifeline, but if I knew one thing about the Mysterious Deep, it was that it never gave–only took. It was luck. Nothing more and nothing less.
The boat cut through the black water toward the waiting horizon, five shadows fleeing an ancient god, and me—haunted by the truth that monsters of the deep were never half as dangerous as what desperation could make of a woman.