Page 28 of Those Fatal Flowers

The knives roll in the boiling water for several minutes before Pisinoe extracts them from the pot with a hook for this purpose. Raidne has already spread a rag across the table to catch them until the metal is cool enough to the touch. Then we reach for our favorites. My gutting knife has a round wooden handle that has long since been stained a deep purple. My boning knife is the thinnest of the three, and my saw is the shortest. I tuck them into a satchel around my waist before turning to my sisters. We’re ready. Raidne leads the way over the edge of the cliff as she did last night, but this time we glide down to the beach where carnage awaits.

The ship is now thousands of fractured pieces scattered across the sand. The spaces between them are littered with its contents—everything from clothes, food, and tools to bodies.

There are dozens. All dead, all in various conditions. Someare so pulverized, their bowels torn open by coral and the meat already poisoned, that processing them isn’t an option.

Our first step is to sort them: which we can salvage, and which must burn instead.

The piles have barely grown (six too bloodied, too broken; two we can butcher) when Pisinoe shrieks from behind one of the ship’s masts. The sound slashes through the air with the same ease as a knife through skin.

“Pisinoe?” Raidne screams, worried she’s been hurt. Did a sailor survive, only to ambush her? No, that can’t be possible; they would still be enchanted by our song…

“Come quickly!”

Her voice draws us both to her side. Raidne immediately begins scouring her arms for signs of injury, but Pisinoe stands in stupefied silence. I find what caused her outburst and grab Raidne’s shoulder roughly, redirecting her attention with a trembling finger.

There, lying in the sand, is the body of a woman. For a moment, I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. In all our years here, a female body has never washed ashore. It’s always been men: men going to war, men buying and selling goods, men on an odyssey. The sight drops me to my knees beside her.

She’s wearing a woven tunic, its shoulders adorned with an intricate pattern of red, yellow, and black, made from what I first mistake as some kind of thick thread. But recognition slowly reveals that the motifs aren’t made with thread at all—they’re individually dyed porcupine quills. How many hours did it take, to stitch each one in its perfect place? The artistry takes my breath away, but then tears rise to my eyes. Something so beautiful should never have ended up here, like this. The same design lines the bottoms of her leggings, which are made from an animal hide. A deer’s, I think, though it’s beencenturies since Scopuli’s allowed me to see one up close. A beaded necklace made from seashells still hangs from her neck—somehow, it survived the rocks and the waves.

The woman’s body is relatively intact, which I’m thankful for, relieved that she was not ripped open like some of the others. But this is the smallest mercy. What was she doing on the ship? I delicately tuck a few locks of long obsidian hair behind her ears and brush the sand from her tanned face. A sense of uneasiness washes over me with the feeling she wasn’t aboard the ship of her own volition. The contents of my stomach swell into my throat.

“Look.” Pisinoe gingerly lifts the woman’s hand to inspect it. A raw red ring encircles each of her wrists. “She was bound.”

Tears pool in our eyes, and we sit in the anguish that men have wreaked upon her.

“Take her from the beach,” Raidne whispers. “She deserves her own pyre.”

Pisinoe and I nod. The discovery shakes us, bringing back uncomfortable memories. We were never mortal, but such horrors aren’t reserved for the mortal realm. How many gentle dryads bore the unwanted burden of a god’s attention? Proserpina’s sacred lineage didn’t stop Dis. Pisinoe kneels beside me and scoops her arms beneath the woman’s frame and lifts her as if she’s made of air. Such is the strength of our chimeric bodies. Pisinoe unfurls her great black wings and ascends from the beach.

The day reveals six more women. We bring each to the grassy area at the forest’s edge atop the cliffs so that we can bury them properly. The men’s corpses don’t receive the same treatment. By midmorning, we finish sorting them. Fifty-four dead total, including the females.

Only eleven sailors are in good enough condition tobutcher, and we start work on those first. We use the jagged rocks of the cliff face as anchors to hoist the bodies into the air, hanging them by their feet. Then we cut the clothes from the carcasses, slit their throats, and drain their blood. The fluid spurts onto the sand, staining the ground a brilliant red. Their fingers graze back and forth across the grains as we work, coloring the fleshy tips crimson.

Once the blood is entirely drained from a body, the next step is to gut it.

I carefully slide my blade into the soft skin of my first sailor’s lower abdomen, right below where a patch of thick, curly black hair begins. Starting in the wrong spot risks puncturing his stomach and spoiling the meat, but I’ve had plenty of practice. The blade scores easily down his midline to the base of his neck, but the rib cage is more difficult to overcome. The man’s lifeless eyes bulge down at the ground as if in protest; if he were alive, he’d gag on his bloated tongue. It was a gruesome sight in the beginning, but the effect hasn’t fazed me in centuries—the whole process is now more familiar than dressing a deer.

I split him open, and a hot wave hits me in the face. Good. Releasing this heat will slow the decomposition process as well. Sawing through the ribs takes a bit of effort, even with my strength returned. Their bodies are designed to protect their organs, even in death, and they don’t offer their insides willingly. I must work for them.

But with the ribs removed, the rest is straightforward. I scoop out the stomach, the lungs, the heart, the intestines, all the viscera that made him, until the cavity is empty.

All that’s left is to skin and quarter him. Everything unusable—the threadbare clothes, extra flesh, fat, and bowels—is tossed onto the pile to be burned. Once we’re finished with all the bodies, we’ll set the heap ablaze. Wesave this step for last, though. Everything that preceded is a necessity to cheat death; but this little violation, this final jab, is for us. Let them rot. The goal is to be profane.

Back at the hovel, our table becomes a preparation space. We cut the meat into long strips, then rub them generously with salt before stacking them inside a large crock, adding more salt between each layer. The mineral will preserve the meat for several weeks, and we’ll stretch it as long as we’re able. It’s a shame it’s early autumn and not winter. Freezing the salted meat makes it last nearly forever—in this way, we have something in common.

We work until the sun reaches its midday zenith, managing to process six carcasses. The remaining join their mangled brothers on our pyre.

We need the rest of the afternoon for what’s next. Raidne and I make our way to the bluff where we’ve laid the women. Pisinoe joins us with a bucket of water and washcloths in hand. We take care to clean them—wiping the salt from their skin, removing the sand from beneath their nails. Raidne brushes their hair, and I help Pisinoe stitch closed the tears in their clothing. Then we dress their necks and wrists with more jewels, but we leave their original ornaments in place—delicate earrings carved from animal bones, white and purple bracelets made with beads cut from clam shells. So much has already been stolen from them by the men on the beach, by the sea, and even by us. We won’t take anything else.

Once they’re ready, I delicately insert a gold coin between each set of teeth. Then we dig graves and fill them with dried wood. Raidne adds handfuls of elderberries and persimmons to each, and Pisinoe inters casks of wine. After we’ve laid each woman onto her own pyre, I place bouquets of astersand goldenrods in their hands. Then we set them ablaze. Their fires burn until the sun hangs low in the sky, and when only embers remain, we return the displaced earth and mark each site with a stone.

Back in our cottage, I light incense to lift away today’s death from our home, then Raidne prepares us a large roast with some of the fresh meat. Pisinoe pours mugs of blackberry wine, and finally, a sense of relief breaks through the exhaustion of the day. We did it. We survived.

“Want to explore the wreckage tonight?” Pisinoe asks as she picks the last bit of meat from a bone, and although I can barely move, the idea is too enticing to ignore. Our larder might be full, but there’s still hunting to be done: This time, it’s for treasure.

As with our preferences for knives, we’ve developed unique salvaging techniques over the years. Raidne is drawn to the paper items first: waterlogged books and letters written in tongues we can no longer decipher, large maps with bleeding ink. In the coming days, she’ll meticulously separate the soaked parchment pieces as best she can and hang them to dry before the fireplace, as if our home were purposefully decorated with paper garlands. At night, firelight filters through the parchment, casting strange and beautiful shadows onto the walls where they dance for us.

Pisinoe heads straight toward chests, barrels, and bags, her hawkish eyes scouring for jewelry and other valuable personal effects. She adds each new locket, golden cross, and hair ornament to her hoard as she uncovers them, admiring her image in each reflective surface she finds. This time, it’s an elaborately carved silver hand mirror. She loses herself in the swoops and curls of its filigree, unbothered bythe large crack in the glass that leaves her image shattered. She’s content to revel in the drama of it all, pretendingto be the bejeweled goddess she never had the chance to become.

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