Page 92 of Wicked Tides
~The Wanderer
I stood at the edge of a rickety dock where it was clear boats no longer came. While Vidar and his men loaded up fresh supplies onto the Rose, I stood looking out into the gently rolling waves. Thelasa had given me an old dress of hers and being so tightly cinched into the heavy fabric was making me a little irritable, but she insisted. She gave me a strange speech about not proving her wrong and not breaking her trust, but I didn’t hear all of it. I was mostly focused on the way she touched me without fear.
People didn’t do that.
If they lived long enough to know what I was, they usually looked at me with hate, disgust, or dread. Perhaps Thelasa had been a little shaky when she handed the dress to me, but she covered her fear well. I half expected the dress to have been soaked in hemsbane, but the fibers were clean.
When I finally spotted Meridan’s ghostly silhouette beneath the water, I straightened. Her head breached the surface and her whiteeyes fixed on me. There was a sense of bitterness in the way she ogled my dress like I was wearing the skin of our own people. As she drifted toward the dock, she lifted her head fully from the water and pursed her full lips with disappointment.
“Are you one of them now?” she muttered.
I knelt on the dock’s edge and hung my feet over. I had removed my shoes as soon as Thelasa walked away and hid them in a corner. I hated the feel of shoes. And it made shifting that much more tedious. Feeling the cold water around my ankles soothed my dry skin.
“The tavern woman simply gave me the dress to make her feel less uneasy in my presence,” I sighed. “I suppose it does make me look eerily human.”
“Human. And ugly.”
I snorted at her comment as she rested her elbows on the dock beside me.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re leaving. Vidar swears we’re not long for the shores where the girls were taken.”
“Well, the waters are quiet at the very least. I’ve been keeping to the grottos, but even so, I’ve not heard the xhoth since we arrived.”
“They’re busy gorging on that other crew, I’m sure.”
The horrifying thought that I was nearly devoured alongside the men came to me and I shivered. It must have been more visible than I thought because Meridan raised her head, alert.
“What is it?” she asked.
There were many things I wanted to say. She didn’t know what happened between Vidar and me and I feared what she would think if I told her. What we did the previous night was beyond the game of manipulation I was playing. I went to him selfishly, in need of relief. Of pain. Of feeling. I hadn’t tried to manipulate him. I simply offered myself in hopes that he’d accept, and he did.
No, I was not going to tell her about that yet.
But I had much more to say and it was eating at me.
“I hear them,” I said.
Her brows furrowed. “Now?”
“No. I mean, I hear their words. Their voice.” I looked at her, catching her gaze. “In my dreams. They’re calling to me, Meridan, and I don’t know why.”
“Our people… they go to the depths and they come back with child or—”
“I know. I know what going to them will do to me. If they choose not to tear me apart, I’ll return with no shred of myself left. So my choices are death or madness. I can only…” I choked on my words, trying not to sound as broken as I was. “I will never see the light again, whether I return or not. I will never know freedom and they will never grant me the relief of death. It is the only hell I will not stand for. I will die before then.”
She reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing it in her long, bony fingers.
“I will not let them have you.”
“You cannot stop them. And I don’t expect you to.”
“Then what will you do? Being in the water is more dangerous than ever if the father has set his eyes on you.”
“Then I must not go in the water.”
She tore her hand away as if she’d burned herself. “You cannot stay forever on land.”
