Page 18 of The Withering Dawn
I turned on him again and lifted my chin, looming over his smaller frame.
“Talk of it again and I will not give you a choice on whether or not you stay ashore. I will find another doctor for my crew.”
He nodded, defeated, and sidestepped to move away from the wall. “Very well.”
I knew Henry to have a questionable past, but never had he been so insistent. I looked at my men and hung my thumbs on my belt, waiting for someone else to speak up against my decision. Despite their uncertain glances at each other, no one said anything and eventually they dispersed with a few dismissive shrugs and tired groans. Cathal walked up to me, mimicking my stance.
“Dangerous decision ye made there,” he said. “But I think the men are tired enough not to care right now.”
“I cannot sell her. That’s my decision.”
“I’m not judging. I watched her haul ye out of the water and then climb the nets, full well knowing you’d probably put her in a cell or kill ‘er.”
“She snatched my knife right through the bars. Sliced open her palm just to show me she bled. That’s why I was in her cell.”
He sighed loudly, raising his brows. “Can’t imagine why she’d do that.”
“I recall a time that all of us were so out of our minds, we did things we couldn’t explain.”
Cathal went quiet, letting my words cook. I knew that the year following our escape, he’d taken a blade to his thigh more than once. I never confronted him about it because I had done the same thing to the inside of my bicep. The cuts were shallow, but deep enough to bleed and I did it to feel… something else. What Aeris did was not the same thing, but I imagined that some of the same crazed inner thoughts were driving her to the same edge of madness that we’d all been tiptoeing on our whole lives.
“Sirens don’t have hearts,” Cathal continued. “Not if ye believe the stories.”
I glanced up at the slowly brightening sky above us. “I will talk to her tomorrow after we’ve all had time to think.”
“And how will she answer with no tongue?”
“Her tongue has regrown. She spoke to me. Not that I needed her to speak. I brought her paper to write.”
He shifted his weight as if I’d just told him someone else had died. “She can speak? Cap’n, none of us have those little things to wear around our necks.”
“Things?”
“The bronze trinkets hunters wear that skew the tones in a siren’s voice.”
“A silentium.”
“Right. A siren’s voice could drive us all mad and we wouldn’t even know it.”
I pointed toward the crow’s nest above us where a bronze bell the size of my head hung above it.
“We have a bell. Any siren that uses those strange tones to try and sway us will make that bell hum and their voice will not work.”
“That’s shotty at best. It’s meant to warn us about them. Not prevent their voice from splitting our minds.”
“She hasn’t used her voice on me. She had the chance. She didn’t.”
“How do ye know?”
“How do we know anything? I just know that I cannot kill her and I cannot sell her. I cannot.” I paused for a moment, flexing my hand and remembering how it felt when I woke to her holding it. “I cannot, my friend.”
Cathal, despite his strong demeanor, rarely questioned my decisions, no matter how foolish they were. The fact that he was questioning me now meant he had a lot of reservations that perhaps I was too blind to. Normally, it seemed that the man reveled in thedangerous unknown and liked to do things just to see what would happen and what would finally kill him. We both suffered from that need for excitement, but sometimes I questioned if it clouded my judgement too much. Jumping on a ship, unorganized and drunk with adrenaline, got Oliver killed. Our lack of planning and hasty approach had consequences and perhaps my decision regarding Aeris would, too.
“What about the kiss?” he asked, his nose wrinkling. “You kissed her?”
“She kissed me,” I corrected, withholding the words she said afterwords.
They still hurt when I replayed them in my head.
