Chapter 14 #3
Dashiell held his expression still. This he remembered from that long ago summer; Tamsyn’s certainty about the Lady Jane had been smooth and immediate and final, as if she needed Jory’s account to be false.
Why? Because she, too, had seen the ship and not heeded the warning?
Or because she had not heeded the concerns of her brother until it was too late?
“I would not have come to you,” Jago said, expression guarded. “Not for anything else.”
“I know,” Dashiell said. “But come to me you did. So, what is it precisely that you want?”
Jago looked past him, eyes momentarily unfocused as he stared into the distance. Then, as though the words were pulled from him against his will, “Only confirmation that I am not mad.”
His expression was open, searching, waiting for the reassurance that his dead brother had not been mad. That he was not mad.
“You sought reassurance from a man the village labels unsound?” Dashiell made a huff of disbelief.
Jago did not smile. “You are the only one who would know,” he said simply. “One way or the other.”
Dashiell let the words sit.
He did know. That was the truth of it. One way or the other, he knew.
“Does it mean I will die?” Jago asked. The question came out flat, and Dashiell was in that moment reminded of how young Jago was…six years younger than Jory. “The ship. Jory saw her and then he—” He stopped. “Is that what it means?”
Dashiell studied him in silence for a long moment, then said, “I have been seeing her for eighteen years. I am not dead yet.”
A mixture of relief and wariness colored Jago’s expression. He had been braced for the worst answer and instead received one that was less so. “Then what does it mean?”
“I have not determined that,” Dashiell said.
“I have concluded that it is not a simple portent. It does not mean death is imminent.” He spread his hands.
“It means only that there is something in your nature that allows you to see her, that she seeks you out for reasons unknown. That she has noticed you.”
Jago’s stare settled in the distance as he absorbed this. Then he nodded, reaching a decision, and returned his gaze to Dashiell.
“Jory was afraid,” he said. “He told Tamsyn about the ship the morning before he died. They had a terrible row about it, one of the worst I can remember, and there were many. Tam and I have always been easy together. She and Jory were the kind of wrong fit that grinds.” He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up.
“Tamsyn said he was being foolish. That he was terrified of a fishing vessel and a trick of the light.” His lips compressed in a tight line.
“I was surprised she dared speak to him so. Their fights were more often one-sided, with Jory the one to spew harsh words.”
Raking his fingers back through his hair, Jago looked away, jaw set, as though he carried out a silent debate. Finally, he said, “Jory was not easy. You knew that.”
“I knew that,” Dashiell said.
“He was arrogant. Spoiled. My father’s beloved heir.
My mother’s firstborn son.” There was no bitterness in his tone.
He made the observations as simple facts.
“Tam was the elder by two years. Cleverer than Jory. More capable. He could never forgive her for it. He hated her. It was not resentment. It was hatred.” He paused.
“He treated her badly. And when I tried to intervene, she would stop me, shield me, keep me safe. Because Jory was ever the one to destroy anything that got in his way.” Regret, perhaps guilt, flitted across his features. “But I wanted to keep her safe.”
The words settled between them. Dashiell had known the siblings fought, that the texture of what lay between Jory and Tamsyn was not that of ordinary sibling conflict, that Jory’s temper often spilled from words to fists. He had been on the receiving end himself more times than he could count.
He had known, too, that Jago idolized Tamsyn, and she him, that she had shielded Jago from the worst Jory could offer.
“Well,” Jago said into the growing silence.
“Well,” Dashiell echoed.
“I—” Jago hesitated, then said, “I bid you good day.”
Dashiell stood for a moment, contemplating the information Jago had revealed.
Then Jago spun, walking backward. The sun hit his face just so, glinting off his hair, and for a moment, Dashiell could have sworn it was Jory before him.
A wave of dizziness took him, the street around him falling away.
The sounds of people and carts and horses faded, replaced by a loud buzzing that in itself faded, leaving only silence.
His stomach lurched as a fragment arrived without warning or context.
A memory. Someone on the cliff. Not Jory.
Someone else in a place he had always believed contained only two.
Someone else had been on that cliff.
The fragment of memory offered him presence without a face. The landscape of the void in his recollection shifted and changed, becoming something new.
For eighteen years he had returned again and again to a single question: was I the one who pushed him? He had been trying to find his own guilt or innocence in a fragmented void that gave him neither.
Now, for the first time, he wondered if he had been asking the wrong question.