Chapter Ten #4
“To keep me from being washed overboard when the storm hit,” Marin said. “Really? That’s the part you gasp over? I haven’t even gotten to the best part of the tale.”
“What’s the best part?” Ree asked. He’d hopped away from Stowy, who was happily consuming the bits of smoked fish that Ree had been parceling out to him.
Marin wondered if Ree had raided her entire supply of smoked fish.
She should have specified which was for use and which was for meals. Oh well, how much can one cat eat?
Marin said, “After they tied me to the mast, as the magic storm was beginning to hit … magic-charged lightning everywhere, howling winds, waves as high as the masthead … they made a bargain with a sea witch.”
She expected Dax to scoff: there’s no such thing as a sea witch. But he didn’t. He just listened, rapt. Ree too had drawn even closer. “What’s a sea witch?” Ree asked.
Marin glanced at Dax. “You’ve probably sung songs about them.”
He nodded. “There’s a harp piece called the ‘Lament of the Sea Witch.’ She supposedly was a woman whose husband died at sea. She threw herself into the waves, and as an apology, the ocean granted her knowledge of spells. It’s not considered to be historically accurate.”
“The sea witch we met wasn’t a woman,” Marin said. “At least not a human one.”
“Ooh,” Ree said, “what was she?”
“A shark,” Marin answered. “A tiger shark.”
“Whoa,” Ree said.
“The tiger shark was with child, and in return for her assistance, my parents promised her a safe place to birth her young, in a cove by our home. Tiger sharks are born as tiger cubs and have to live on land for two years until they grow into their shark form. A lot of them don’t make it—they’re vulnerable as cubs without their mother shark to protect them.
Well, my parents agreed, and the sea witch cast a spell to divert the winds, keeping us safe, and we emerged from the other side of the storm. ”
Fascinated, Ree was motionless. “Then what?”
She noticed that Perri had drawn closer, listening too, even though he’d heard a variation of this story dozens of times.
Sometimes the witch was a mermaid, sometimes a dolphin.
Once, when Marin had told it to a particularly rapt audience, she’d claimed it was a kraken.
But this version … This one was the truth.
“In spring, she swam up to our dock, and my parents kept their promise, hiding her child and caring for her, until the cub was shark enough for them to swim away.” She mimed the sharks swimming with her hands.
“It was risky. One of their neighbors spotted the shark in the cove and came to get rid of the cub, but my parents wouldn’t let that happen.
” She had a fuzzy memory of her mother marching outside, armed with a fishing pole.
She wasn’t exactly sure what Ma had planned to do with it—poke the neighbors if they didn’t go away?
“You asked about my parents, and that’s them: willing to risk themselves for their child and for someone else’s child.
That sea witch could have asked them for anything, and they’d have said yes.
They also could have chosen to abandon the sea witch and not help protect her offspring, but they didn’t even hesitate. ”
Dax smiled. “They sound wonderful.”
“Also, unrelated, Pa bakes an amazing peach pie.”
“I can’t wait to taste it,” he said.
It was only after she’d sailed for a few minutes more that she realized that her story, as sweet and charming as she thought it was, might have been a terrible one to tell.
Dax’s parents were nothing like that. They’d shipped him off as a child.
She hadn’t intended to hurt him with her tale.
It was only that he’d asked, and the tiger shark story was the most typical of the way they were. “Dax, I didn’t think … Your parents…”
“They were terrible parents,” Dax said cheerfully. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“It’s not okay they were terrible,” Dax agreed, “but what I meant was: it’s okay that you told me about yours. Our stories don’t need to be the same for us to be friends.”
Marin opened her mouth and then shut it.
We’re friends? Of course they were friends.
They’d been friends for years, chatting every time she’d visited the conservatory for a delivery, and she’d saved him from the burning city.
Obviously they were friends. Why, then, did the word feel like it didn’t fit right?
It felt … smaller than she wanted. She chose not to focus on that too much.
“I’m not sure a captain is allowed to be friends with her crew,” she said lightly, smiling as if she were just joking, though she wasn’t sure she was.
“I hope we are,” Dax said, his eyes intense.
She felt caught in his gaze, and whatever she would have said back fled her mind as quickly as a wave. The wind whispered in her ear, Danger, danger, danger. It was not okay for her to yearn for more.
“All you have to do to be friends,” Ree said with the air of a plant who was imparting great wisdom, “is feed each other fish.”