Page 7 of The Withering Dawn (Wicked Tides)

Two dozen of my crewmen stood before me on the deck. The storm was beginning to calm and the rain had become a light sprinkle. I stood at the edge of the quarterdeck overlooking the men and leaned forward on the railing with a sigh. It was early and my men looked ready to hear the plans.

“We’re heading to port, but only for provisions,” I announced.

The men exchanged glances and Cathal watched, his eyes keenly searching for suspicious disagreement in their demeanors. He was good at that.

“We sellin’ the siren?” someone asked.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, coming to terms with my decision.

“No,” I said.

The men shifted their weight. Raised their brows. I could tell they were going to question me and I didn’t have much to say beyond that I didn’t think Aeris deserved to be sold.

“What are we doing with her, then?” someone else asked. “We can’t keep a siren on the ship, can we?”

“She’ll eat us all the first chance she gets. Heard stories, I have. The only good siren is a dead one.”

“When we get to port, anyone who disagrees with this decision is free to leave and enlist with another crew,” I announced.

“Treson Harbor has a lucrative market for things like her,” Henry spoke up. “You could get a fair amount of coin for a living specimen there.”

“She’s not a specimen and we already got a fair amount of coin from the Perry Smith.”

“With all due respect, captain. She is not a woman.”

“With all due respect, doctor,” Cathal cut in. “She saved our cap’n from the water. It’s his choice what he does with her.”

“It is not a crime to have a voice on my ship,” I said, looking Henry in the eyes as I walked down the steps. “But like I said. If you do not like my decision, you can find work at the next port.”

Henry swallowed, looking at me over the rim of his glasses. “I am only stating that her kind is very manipulative. This could all be a ploy and you’re playing into it.”

“What would you do? Sell her? Kill her?”

He shrugged. “I would study her. What I find could prove instrumental to those in the business of hunting sirens.”

“You want to cut her open. On my ship.”

“If you would allow—”

“No.”

He shook his head with the beginnings of a humorless laugh. “You are falling for her charms. There is no other reason you would have willingly unlocked her cell and gone in there and kissed—"

I clutched the front of Henry’s vest and spun him around, shoving him against the wall below the helm. He raised his hands in surrender, turning his face down like a dog who’d just been slammed to the ground by a wolf.

“You what?” Cathal asked.

I released Henry with a growl and stepped back to look him.

“It was nothing.”

“How was it nothing when you were in her cell?” Henry said, straightening his vest. “She is a foul creature. They all are.”

“Ye’ve never even seen one before her,” Cathal pointed out, folding his arms over his broad chest.

“Which is why my studies could—”

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 the dangerous 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.

I’ve never kissed a man. If this is the last I see of you and this world, I wanted to know what it felt like.

“Fuck,” I swore under my breath. “Tell me I am an idiot.”

“Yer an idiot.”

“Agh, no. That didn’t help.”

“Cap’n. If it feels wrong to sell her, don’t. But now we have to figure out what to do with her. She saved ye and came aboard this ship for a reason. Find out what it is.”

By the next day, the sky had drowned in another wave of monstrous clouds ready to devour us whole. It was as if the weather was warning us to stay away from that part of the world. The part of the world where all manner of horrendous creatures haunted the water. The winds forced us to reduce the sails again while the waters thrashed like a wild bull trying to toss us off it.

“Storm’s not looking as friendly today, cap’n!” Cathal shouted over the loud sea spray rearing up from the bow.

I steered the Amanacer in the direction of the wind, riding the undulating waves with as much grace as the weather would allow. With most of our cargo tied down already, I wasn’t overly worried about things flying about, but the water threatened to push us in directions we didn’t want to go. Visibility was minimal. With how thick the clouds had become, there was little more sunlight than there was at night. Thunder clapped loudly, lighting up the heavens with flashes of white.

“Aleksi!” I bellowed. “Crow’s nest! ”

Without a second thought, he sprinted across the inclined deck to the mast. The man was slender and could carry his own weight better than anyone and his sharp eyes could warn us of rocks. Barefooted and fast, he ascended the shroud, battling high winds and aggressive rain. Every time the gale shifted, I turned with it, pushing the Amanacer every way the storm went in hopes of staying on its good side. As a large wave drove us up high and tilted the bow downward, a massive curtain of sea water rose up on either side with a roar.

“Woo!” Cathal hooted, flipping his soaked hair out of his face.

I let out a loud guffaw. The thrill of riding a storm on a ship like the Amanacer never got old. Most of the men remained below deck, likely hanging on for their lives as the ship rocked and swayed.

“We don’t need sirens to look death in the eye, eh!” Cathal shouted.

“Aye, we have all the danger we need right here!” I replied.

“Think she’ll pull through?”

“The Amanacer was built for this. She will outsmart this storm. She always does!”