Page 36 of Those Fatal Flowers

“Slowly, slowly. You’ll make yourself sick if you drink too fast.”

He heeds my warning and lowers the vessel from his face, wiping water from his mouth with the back of a salt-stained arm. His eyes lock onto mine. “Who are you?”

“My name is Thelxiope.” I pause, watching his face crumble at the unfamiliar chain of sounds.

“Thelxiope,” he repeats, stumbling over its music. “What are you?”

“Unlucky, just like you.” The truth is that I don’t know what I am, exactly, besides cursed. I’d never heard ofcreatures like us before our transformation, and poring over books the sailors brought with them while they were still written in tongues we could read offered very few clues.

Once, several hundred years ago, Raidne found a broken shard of pottery in the surf after a large fleet of soldiers crashed upon our cliffs. The clay was black, and the fragment depicted the image of an ochre bird with a woman’s head. Her eyes were closed and her lips parted, as if either waiting for a kiss or lost mid-song. It was the only clue we ever found, but the sea claimed the rest of the vase, and there were no accompanying words to describe what the image was.

We must have been known. Our sin was too great, our punishment too unique to go unsung. People revel in tales with tragic setups and doomed protagonists, and our story has both. The fact that our history ended with a metamorphosis would only make it more popular, more enduring.

“That’s not what I meant,” he objects. “I have never seen a being—”

“If there’s a name for what I am, I don’t know it,” I confess, cutting his sentence short.

He falls quiet for a moment before responding with another question. “What did you mean byenchanted? Back in the cave?”

“What do you remember from last night?”

“I was on the lower gun deck during a bitch of a storm…I heard a bunch of commotion above, but before I could make it back up, something hit me.” He touches the side of his head above his ear, the same wound that was oozing last night. The bleeding seems to have stopped, but he still snaps his hand away. “Maybe a lantern? Everything was getting tossed around as the waves battered us. But whatever it was, it knocked me unconscious. I woke up in the cave.”

So that explains his coherence. He was unconscious before our song could reach him.

The sun has risen above the horizon, although it still sits low in the sky. I grow uncomfortable under the man’s watchful eye, which still waits for an answer. Instead, I offer the small satchel of nuts and meat to him, anxious to draw his attention from my form. “Hungry?”

He takes it from me roughly, then lifts softened eyes to meet mine in apology. I scowl back; I don’t want it. “I need to go, but I’ll be back later with more water and food. If you value your life, don’t stray too far from here. And never light a fire during daylight hours unless I’m with you.”

“What happens next?” he asks, a fresh glimmer of fear beneath his words.

“I don’t know,” I admit. I can’t be sure when, or if, his purpose will be revealed to me.Please, Proserpina, tell me what to do.“But first we’ll need to clean those wounds.”

“My name is Jaquob, by the way!” he calls out to me once my back is turned. There’s something in his tone that catches me by surprise—playfulness.

Jaquob. What in the name of the gods am I supposed to do with you?

Raidne and Pisinoe, still glistening from their swim, find me on Scopuli’s beach. Pisinoe’s eyes are large and expecting, desperate to hear if I discovered the message I claimed to be searching for. When I shake my head, her lips turn downward in a sympathetic frown. Raidne doesn’t say a word. Instead, she heads straight for the pile of bodies. All that’s left to do is burn them.

We get to work constructing a wooden platform of slow-burning oak logs, interweaving twigs of birch between them.The birch will catch the entire structure ablaze quickly, while the oak will smolder until only ash remains. When the structure is nearly as tall as us, and stuffed with kindling, we place the corpses, stacking them like logs until they tower over us.

Pisinoe places additional branches and birch bark between the tangles of limbs and lolling heads, and finally, we’re ready. By now the bodies are putrid. Good. The outsides of these men reflect their fetid insides, and their sweet rot lures clouds of flies to the beach. The insects crawl over the corpses’ milky dead eyes, looking for entry. Pisinoe frowns; she feels bad that they, too, will fall victim to the flames. For a moment, I think she’ll try to shoo them away, but instead she nods to Raidne, who strikes two rocks together over the formation.

Chtt, chtt, chtt,the stones chirp before emitting a single spark that sets the entire heap ablaze.

The flames erupt along the kindling and consume the clothes. Eventually, when the conflagration is hot enough, they find the skin and the meat. Darkling smoke billows up toward the heavens, and although Pisinoe says a prayer under her breath, there’s no formal dedication. These bodies are too soiled and too broken to gift in offering. Instead, they burn for no one.

When all that remains is bone, we return to the wreckage. We find personal artifacts—pouches of gold and silver, letters, and the occasional locket—along with a large quantity of animal pelts. Raidne is thrilled to discover a wooden trunk filled with maps, but Pisinoe’s left disappointed when she finds nothing grander than last night’s mirror. A treasure ship this is not. By now the sun is low in the sky, and my stomach rumbles. Jaquob must be starving, but he’ll have to wait.

Only when I’m certain that Pisinoe and Raidne have been claimed by sleep do I cross the small stretch of sea, but notbefore retrieving two casks of alcohol we discovered in the wreckage. I’ll need them to clean Jaquob’s wounds. Even still, I keep low to the water as I fly, like a seabird searching for food to bring to its children back on the shore.

I used to wonder what it would be like to be those birds, but I no longer torment myself with such thoughts.

Jaquob sits on one of the large gray stones that encircle the firepit, wearing a dark expression. He’s built a small pyramid of wood, but he hasn’t set it aflame.

“You told me not to light it without you.” A pause. “From the looks of it, you had your own fire this afternoon.”

“We had to clear the bodies,” I say.

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