Page 16 of Found at Sea

6

Kellan

Sleep used to come so easy for me. Even as a young boy, starving and on the streets, I'd been able to fall asleep anywhere: in a bed of straw, beneath a tree, in a field, and even on an uneven dirt path in the village where beasts and man would stumble upon me.

But now? My mind refused to rest.

I lay in my quarters, resting on the soft bed and under the warm blanket, and tried to tune into the sound of the water sloshing against the side of my ship. Some nights it cleared my mind and helped me find solace in dreams.

However, it was doing nothing for me now.

Knowing sleep was too far out of my reach, I got off the bed and walked into my study. Perhaps work would provide the distraction I needed. I sat at my desk and looked over the map.

TheCrimson Nightshould be arriving in the town of Stonebridge in three days’ time. Since our last port was cut short due to the small, auburn-haired beauty I’d brought aboard, it’d be good to stop again and let the crew fully enjoy themselves.

Fletcher. The thought of him, of his wide-eyed wonder and innocence, called to something in me. It was a possessiveness that settled in my core and made me want to kill any man who laid hands on him.

Nearly a week had passed since he’d come aboard, and within that time, I hadn’t sought him out. But I’d watched from afar. He and Alek seemed to be getting along fairly well. Since the day they’d started talking, they’d been almost inseparable.

I was still unsure of why I’d bothered with Fletcher. There was nothing extraordinary about him, and yet…the thought of leaving him behind had been difficult to stomach. Being an impulsive man—one who took what he wanted when he wanted it—I had only done what came natural to me.

Sifting through a stack of papers, I saw it. A leather-bound book hidden beneath the stack. It was one I tried to hide but nothing would ever hide its contents from my mind. Not all the contents…but a single page.

I had memorized the words, but I often found myself opening the book and reading them over and over again, as if the continuous reading would somehow make them clearer. To give me the answers I sought.

Time was running out.

Even three years later, I could still remember the sea witch’s face and hear her unnerving voice as she spoke the curse.

He who has wronged the sea and caused great fear

Must be tried and his heart then weighed

For if wrongs are not made right by his thirtieth year

He will become a shade

Eternal life, forever alone, no drink to quench his thirst

He will walk in shadow, from the living he’ll be apart

And alas, will he, answer for his crimes, cursed

Unless he earn another heart

Hundreds of times I’d read the riddle, trying to decipher the meaning. Becoming a shade was a fate worse than death. I’d be alive, but no one would be able to see or hear me. Touch me. No food would satiate my hunger. I’d eventually beg for death, but never be able to die.

“You will be silenced like all thoseyouhave silenced,” the witch had told me before her lips had stretched into a malicious smile.

And silenced them I had.

I had killed many people; most of them had deserved it but some had not. The action that punished me above all was the slaughtering of mermaids. The sea had been angered by my cruelty. To harm children of Poseidon was an act that could not go unpunished.

Do not think on it now, I told myself, refusing to venture down that dark path.

I was not the same man I’d been back then. Many of the legends surrounding me had derived from that time in my life, when I’d killed without mercy. In a way, I still held onto a piece of that man, unable to fully break away from my past.

The answer to stopping the curse was hidden within the riddle, but I could not make sense of it. It spoke of a heart, so after three years of attempting to decipher it, an idea had struck.