Rake could see it right away — the boy wanted the treasures for himself. He could see already the dreams of wealth forming in his little mind.
The girl, on the other hand, hardly seemed to notice. She kept her eyes on Rake and the captain, as if expecting them to attack at any moment.
One would make a far better sailor than the other; that much was clear.
Both the boy and his sister had their hair shorn to the quick, as urchins, lice-infested and starving, often did. Some would buy hair off the destitute to stuff pillows. And if they couldn’t sell it, well, no hair meant no lice. The boy was about the age Rake had been when he’d begun his career as a criminal — maybe thirteen. The girl, though, was smaller, maybe ten or eleven. Too young for the rusted knife she carried in her fist.
The boy did all the talking.
“And anyway, sir, as you can see, we ain’t afraid of hard work nor violence.”
“An easy thing to promise,” Rake said.
“Aye, but sirs, even Flora here’s got grave digging under her belt. I mean, lookit her! She seem unprepared for a life o’ hardship?”
The girl said nothing.
“She’s a girl,” Rake said. Again. He’d been making this point ever since the two had stepped aboard. The boy was all bluster. And the girl was a girl. Why the captain had allowed them on the Dove at all was completely beyond him. A ship was no place for a little girl, and a pirate ship doubly so.
“Tell me,” the captain said. “Would you promise me your undying devotion and loyalty?”
“Aw, yes, sir, of course, sir, for our whole lives, sir,” the boy replied hastily.
“And you would never shirk your duties to me?”
“No, sir, never, sir. We’d work so hard you’d have to dream up more jobs for us,” said the boy.
“Tell me, girl,” the captain said, turning his full attention to her. The girl, Flora, did not move, did not blink. “If I told you to, would you kill?”
Say no, Rake urged silently. Say never.
“Yes,” Flora said.
The captain laughed. The sound of it, ugly and empty, echoed in his cabin. “You’re just a chit of a thing!” He could hardly contain himself, he was laughing so hard. “And you’re ready to kill?”
“I seen dead bodies before,” she said, as if that were all it took.
“It’s true!” the boy cried. “We seen loads of ’em in the street. We saw old Peeves take a knife to the eye! One minute he was shooting the shit, and the next, bam! Blood everywhere, an —”
“Tell me,” the captain interrupted. He was still looking at Flora. “Would you kill Rake here if I asked you to?”
Rake rolled his eyes.
“Yes,” Flora said.
The captain clapped his hands, laughing again. “Oh, marvelous, marvelous. What a little sprite you are, what a little demon.” He looked at the girl approvingly. “I think I may have room aboard for the likes of you.”
Rake wanted to hit him, the idea was so stupid. Who would let a child aboard a pirate ship? She’d be dead in a week, if not sooner. He supposed that since the captain could no longer remember his own childhood, he hardly had respect for the sanctity of anyone else’s.
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” The boy was beaming — already, Rake guessed, imagining himself the next captain of the crew. “You won’t regret it, and we —”
“Not you.” The captain waved his hand at him. “You must go.”
He and Flora looked at each other, clearly panicked. “What?” the boy asked, his voice quiet.
But Flora stared right back at the captain. “I don’t go nowhere without Alfie,” she said decisively.
“You say that, but what if I told you you’d have meals for the rest of your life, hm? What if I told you you’d have a place to sleep every night until you’re old and gray or until you die?”
But the girl held strong. “Not without Alfie.”
“Girls don’t belong on ships anyway,” Rake said, more to the captain than to her. But Flora glared at him all the same. “They’re bad luck, it isn’t safe for them, and they can’t carry their load.”
“Aw, too bad. You seemed like you’d make a fine sailor.” The captain gave Flora a pitying look.
“She would. She will! And so will I!” Alfie sputtered.
“You, boy,” the captain said, “are all talk.”
“No, sir! Please, sir, give me a chance! We won’t survive another winter here, please!”
“What would he have to do,” Flora asked, still calm, “to prove that we’re both worth it?”
The captain smiled his true smile. Rake saw it infrequently, but when it showed itself, it sent shivers through his body. It wasn’t right. It looked like a skeleton’s smile, toothy and morbid.
“Go back into Crandon,” the captain said. “And bring me the ears of a man you killed.”
The children left, practically sprinting into their life sentence. Not even a moment of pause. Rake had met rough children in his life, but murder was a step above the robberies and beatings the hard kids of his own youth had doled out. The captain was a cruel man.
“What if they actually do it?” Rake asked. He couldn’t imagine the captain truly meant to hire them on; it was foolhardy. They were hardly seasoned murderers — there was no way they’d get away with it, even if they did muster the guts. And besides. A girl? It was mad even by the Nameless Captain’s standards.
“Then I’ll always have at least two sailors in my pocket,” the captain said. He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “They will always owe me, Rake. They will always know they are here by my goodwill, and my goodwill alone. You cannot force that kind of loyalty.”
“Their highest loyalty will always be to each other.”
The captain laughed. “Familial bonds mean less and less with every day aboard this ship, Rake. We sail. We rob. Have you ever seen a crewman of mine write a letter home? All that matters in a life like that is survival. We’ll make solid men out of them both. You’ll see.”
Internally, Rake sighed. Of course family meant nothing to the captain.
The captain couldn’t remember his.
Later, when the children returned, Rake could tell from the bloodlessness of the ears they toted that they had not killed anyone. Found a corpse, rather, and from the looks of it, a child. Cut off the ears and left the body. But the captain did not notice, and so Rake did not say anything.
Well, try again.”
Xenobia, Flora had found, had even less patience than usual for her these days. So when she found Flora in her kitchen again, holding a stone to her ear with a peeved look on her face again, and asked if Flora could tell the stone’s story again, and was told that in fact, no, Flora could not tell the stone’s story again, Xenobia’s face crumpled into a deeply disapproving shape.
Useless.
“I’m no good at this,” Flora spat. I’m no good at anything. She had been trying off and on again for weeks now, it felt. Day in and day out to listen to a goddamn rock tell a goddamn story, and all she ever heard was the sound of her own breath. And occasional cussing. “I have no magic in me.” She sat down at Xenobia’s small table, defeated. It was not like Flora to pout. She was no stranger to hard work. It had been her most steadfast companion. But to see it thwarted — so consistently — shook her.
Xenobia did her best to rearrange her face, strode over to Flora calmly, and took a seat at the table across from her.
“Have you told the stone any of your story?”
Flora nodded. And never in her life had she felt so foolish as she did when whispering to a rock. She passed her fingers over it again. It was warm from her touch, and Flora felt like the longer she held it, the more the pale pink of the quartz dulled, the more its edges softened.
“What story did you tell?”
Flora’s face flushed. “I — I told it the story of when the Lady Hasegawa kissed me. Or kissed Florian, I guess.”
Xenobia sighed and gave Flora what could o
nly be described as a look of profound disappointment.
“There’s your problem,” the witch said. “Try a story from your life you actually understand. Something you hold in your heart. Something that is a part of you.”
Flora held her tongue. That kiss was a part of her now. But Xenobia was right — she hardly understood it. Evelyn had abandoned her, after all. So that kiss could not have meant all that Flora had hoped it had meant, and besides, it had been meant for Florian, not her.
“Think.”
Flora racked her mind. What story was a part of her?
“I have one,” she said finally.
There was a moment when Flora expected Xenobia to leave, but instead Xenobia sat expectantly.
“No time like the present.”
Flora inhaled deeply, trying her best to master herself and ignore her pride. If she wanted to do this, she would need the witch’s help. She held the stone to her chest.
“Listen,” she said, as the witch had told her to. “Once I was a child, starving and scared, and I was told by a cruel man that I’d never be hungry again if I brought him the ears of a person I killed. I didn’t want to kill anyone because I never had. But I knew where there were two dead bodies. My brother and I ran to that place. The bodies were there, two children not so different in age from us. Not a week earlier, we had stolen their bread. And now they were stiff with death. My brother, the coward, could not muster the will to cut the ears off either of them. He vomited and sputtered. So I took his knife. I said, let me do it. And I did. I chose the older brother, not the little sister, because he had not protected her, just as my brother did not protect me.
“I held his head in my lap as I worked. When people say something smells like death, it is because the smell is inescapable, because it’s undeniably what it is. There is no other smell like it. And I sat there with that dead boy’s head in my lap, the smell of his death around me, and I cut off his ears. First his right and then his left. My brother did not want the knife back. It is yours, he told me. Consider it a gift, he said. As his thanks. I still have that knife.”
All the while, as Flora spoke, Xenobia nodded, smiling. “Yes,” she whispered. “Like this.”
Flora took a deep, shaky breath. She was not sure she had ever said these things aloud, ever, in her life. She felt oddly free in the wake of her words, which still seemed to echo around her.
My brother, the coward. How good it felt, to tell that truth. How light she felt, to be rid of him.
And in her pocket, the knife felt cold.
“Now,” Flora said. She held the stone to her ear. It was small and smooth and black, and cold against her skin. “Tell me your story.”
Flora nearly dropped the stone when it started to speak. But Xenobia’s eyes widened with victory and motioned for her to keep it close to her, to listen. And so Flora did.
The stone’s voice was small and soft in her ear.
“Once,” the stone said, “I was under the Sea. Ages and ages I was, until in her rage, the Sea created a great storm that battered the shore. I broke away. I was alone. I was adrift, caught in the current, which beat me against that which I had been a part of, the island and the mountain, again and again. Then the Sea carried me to a soft beach, where I rolled in the waves.
“I rolled back and forth, inland and back out again, for even more ages than I had been a part of the mountain. I rolled until I was nearly flat, all my edges smoothed, and I became the small thing you hold now. And then I was picked up by a girl so that she might throw me into a stream to see how many times I would skip before sinking.
“But in her youth and in her inattention, she forgot she was holding me, and she dropped me on the beach, far from the Sea and her merciless currents. And that is when I was picked up again. So that you could learn my story.”
When the stone finished its tale, Flora sat still, her eyes wide. The stone had spoken. The stone had spoken to her. She knew the stone’s story.
“You heard,” Xenobia said, smiling. It was a true smile, a smile Flora realized she had not seen yet.
“Yes,” Flora said, too stunned to be excited, too nonplussed to recognize her own triumph.
“It is for you to tell that stone the next part of its story.” The witch held Flora’s eyes, her own now serious. “This is real magic, child. Do not take it lightly.”
“I don’t,” Flora said.
“Go on, then.” Xenobia’s eyes shifted so that they shone now with her evident pleasure. “Tell that stone its story.”
And so Flora did. She tried to think of a story that the stone would like, a nice story. A kind story.
“Listen, stone, and listen well: you will go back to the Sea,” Flora whispered. “But you will not dwell upon her shore, being tossed and rocked so violently. No, you will sink to her depths, to her most secret quiet and her tranquility, where the waves do not roll and the currents do not reach. Deep, deep in the Sea, where you will rest upon the soft sand, only ever to be touched with kindness. This is the next chapter of your story. See that it begins now.”
Nearly as soon as she had uttered the last words, the stone shot from her hand. Only when she heard the crash of Xenobia’s only window did Flora realize the stone had flown straight to the Sea, and the shock of it wrenched a laugh from somewhere deep in her belly. How eager the stone was, how pleased it must have been! She leaned back in her chair and shook her head at the curiosity of it.
“What on earth did you say to that stone?”
“I told it to go back to the Sea,” Flora said. She just barely kept her lips from curling into a smile.
Xenobia closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath, as if she were mastering pain. “The Sea?” she asked. But before Flora could answer, her eyes shot open and she stared at Flora as though seeing her for the first time. Or at least, seeing her idiocy for the first time. She held out her hands as though she were either going to cup Flora’s cheeks or strangle her. “Why. Would. You. Give. Your. Story. To. The. Sea?”
“I did not give my story to the Sea. I gave it to the stone.”
“Oh, you precious, stupid thing. Do you think the Sea does not know each stone in her midst? Do you think anything passes in her depths that she does not see?”
Flora said nothing. She had only ever heard one other person speak of the Sea as they would a god, and that was Rake. And he, too, had only ever spoken of the Sea as a dangerous thing.
“Pray,” Xenobia commanded. “Pray that you never run afoul of the Sea, pray she never sees reason to punish you. For she already has more than enough to make it so.”
Flora gulped.
“Pray!” Xenobia shouted.
So Flora hung her head. She did not know how to pray — she never had. But what was prayer except the request for a better story? And so she prayed.
For she had already served aboard the Dove — had already seen mermaids caught and killed.
If punishment was due to anyone, certainly it was already due to her.
Once there was a mermaid who fell in love with a woman.
The mermaid saw the woman twice every day: once when she came to set traps for crabs in the morning, and then again in the evening when she checked the traps. While the woman checked the traps, she hummed a song. While she set the traps, she sang. Her voice was a panacea for the mermaid, and she waited every morning and every evening so that she might catch even a note of the woman’s beautiful voice as she worked.
It is known among mermaids that humans cannot be trusted. They are told this by the Sea from the time that they are born, because it is true, and because humans have always proved themselves poor friends to all others. So the mermaid did not show herself. But still, she pined for this woman and her sweet voice and her strong hands. She thought of nothing else all day and all night. Because mermaids do not sleep, this meant she thought of the woman constantly.
And because she could not tell the Sea of her desire, she sought out a witch.
She found the
witch as she stepped along the tide pools, searching out urchins for a stew.
“Please,” she said. “Make me a human so that I might court the woman I love.”
The witch did not want to — for witches are no fools, and only fools run afoul of the Sea. “I cannot,” she told the mermaid, “for your mother.”
But the mermaid begged so ardently and described the woman so lovingly that the witch felt she could not resist her. For the witch knew love well. She thought of her own love, and the pain she would feel if she could not have them. So she bent under the pressure of the mermaid’s words. She told the mermaid of the love in her life and of her willingness to help.
“Tonight, you must tell the Sea that you wish to leave her,” the witch conceded. “And then I will help you.”
The mermaid vowed that she would do this.
The mermaid lied.
For the Sea is a jealous mother, protective and selfish. The mermaid knew that if she told her mother what she wished to do, the Sea would only stand in her way. And so she did not tell. But still, the mermaid returned the next morning so that she might be turned into a human.
The witch gave the mermaid a looking glass. “Look into this,” the witch commanded, “and listen to my tale. When it is done, you shall be human and free to court the woman you love.”
The witch began her spell.
The Sea could tell that magic was being done, magic that would take her daughter from her, and willingly so. For the Sea has magic, too, far more powerful than any witch’s. And in her anger at her daughter’s betrayal, at the witch’s impertinence, the Sea cast her own spell.
The looking glass she cast into the desert, where it became a small green oasis. There, the Sea exiled her daughter, still a mermaid. There she would live, adrift in the sand and alone, without her mother or her sisters or her love, known to no one.
The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea Page 18