Page 44 of Virelai’s Hoard (The Dagger & Tide Trilogy #1)

Riley

By the time Nivros hung large and red in the sky, the Stingers’ ship was still on the horizon.

Bigger than it had been. They were the same pirates who had sabotaged their ship back at the Wraithspine Isle.

They hadn’t hurt anyone then, but Riley had a feeling that things would play out quite differently in a second go-round.

Despite the crew’s best efforts, the Stingers were gaining ground, and everyone was on edge.

Once Venn took her shift at manning the sails, Riley grabbed her dinner and went to eat it leaned against the railing. Her eyes stayed fixed on the distant silhouette spelling looming danger.

“Do we even know where we’re running to ?” someone asked at her back. “Maybe we should get the captain back. She’d know what to do. She was right about giving up Eryx, wasn’t she? And look at them now–they’re fine !”

They weren’t even trying to be quiet, and Riley glanced toward the quarterdeck, where Sable was. Barking orders, squinting through the dimming light, clenching her fists when she thought the others weren’t looking.

How many such comments had Sable been hearing throughout the day?

The crew was anything but subtle. And Riley wasn’t sure they were wrong, either.

Uneasiness curled somewhere deep in her stomach as she kept shoveling mouthfuls of food, barely even tasting it.

She knew she’d done the right thing. Had Eryx been made to go on that ghost ship instead of them sacrificing themselves, would they still have chosen forgiveness?

She didn’t know, which was answer enough.

However, Sable was clearly out of her depth without the oversight of a captain to take the weight off the important decisions. She wasn’t Calla. And the Stingers were gaining ground.

Gadrielle had split the deckhands into two shifts.

The most experienced sailors would keep the Moonshadow sailing at full speed during the cover of darkness, in an attempt to lose the trail of their would-be attackers.

Shocking no one, Riley hadn’t been picked for that shift.

But even with the soreness in her limbs and the deep exhaustion dragging at her steps, Riley knew she wouldn’t be sleeping a wink tonight.

No one would. Merrow had told them this would be a moonless night, that they would be blind until Nivros’ light broke over the horizon again.

It would make sailing dangerous, tracking the enemy impossible.

It was a mad plan, but the only option they had at fleeing this fight.

Their new captain had taken it without a second thought.

With a lingering look at Sable, and a subtle glance at Patch–who still hadn’t left Eryx’s side–Riley abandoned her half-eaten bowl of food, grabbed a lantern, and made her way below deck.

Calla’s journal felt warm and sticky against her hip, and if she wasn’t going to sleep, she might as well spend the bells painstakingly trying to decipher a page or two out of the former captain’s private thoughts.

She batted away her own fleeting thought of how this would be just another intrusion that Calla hadn’t asked for–hadn’t agreed to.

Just another betrayal. But what was this against what she’d already done? Nothing. It was nothing.

Her legs took her down a familiar path, towards the hold where Sable had taught her how to read.

The act of entering the chamber, locking the door behind her, and sitting at the wide barrel they’d been using as a working space held a surprising hint of comfort to it. She almost wished Sable were there.

She remembered the feel of Sable’s strong arms around her, how the proximity had made her freeze.

It had felt safe, and Riley really hadn’t known what to do with that, the feeling so unfamiliar as to be entirely alien.

So she’d had Sable let go of her, though she’d wanted nothing more than to lean deeper into her embrace, close her eyes, breathe in the scent of smoke and leather until her heart stopped racing and her hands stopped shaking.

But that would’ve been ridiculous. Riley didn’t do attachments.

She didn’t need anyone. Even Patch, the one friend she’d thought she had, had decided he liked other people far better than he liked Riley.

The sting of it made Riley scoff at herself. It resounded in the hold’s emptiness. She settled the lamp on the barrel and finally pulled the journal out from where it had been tucked at her waistband. She flipped it open to the first page.

Then the second, and the third, going through the pages faster and faster until she was through. Head tilted in confusion, she went back to the first.

This… wasn’t what she’d expected.

She remembered her visits to the captain’s cabin, how Calla had spent most of that time at her desk, scribbling in her journal. Writing, Riley had assumed.

She’d been wrong.

The journal was full of drawings.

Coming down here, Riley had expected to find proof of–of a scheming mind, elaborate plans, manipulation tactics, some sort of confession. At the very least, a reason for Calla to have acted the way she did. Something .

Instead she got–this.

Riley flipped through the drawings again, slower, taking the time to really look at them.

A woman, gazing at herself through the surface of a lake as if it were a mirror, her reflected face scratched off.

Several pages of the same woman, half-transformed, not-quite-selkie and not-quite-human, the lines of the sketches harsh, unflattering, unforgiving.

The woman’s body washed ashore, her face buried in the damp sand, drowned in a few inches of water.

The woman running from the sea. Chains lashed out of the water, pulling her back in. Bare feet dug deep crests in the sand in the losing fight.

A selkie, its flesh sculpted to resemble a human body. Blood pooled around the knife at its feet.

The woman crouched down on herself, holding herself together as several shadowy figures reached with claw-like fingers, stripping away chunks of her skin.

Riley saw herself in one of those figures, and her fingers started shaking. She flipped the page to the next.

This one she recognized. It resembled the sketch she’d pulled from her desk, without Calla realizing, and as she flipped through the rest of the journal, Riley figured out why Calla hadn’t realized.

There were dozens of drawings of the Heart of the Abyss, each a little different, each the same, obsession bleeding out of the pages and screaming in Riley’s face.

The latest sketches didn’t even have any detail.

Just the dark shape of it and deep indents, as if Calla had drawn over it over and over, losing control of herself.

Riley snapped the journal shut, her heart racing. The slow, creeping suspicion of what Calla wanted with the Heart strangled the breath out of her lungs.

She’d been wrong about the captain. So very wrong.

***

In the dark of night, Riley roamed the ship aimlessly.

She was unsettled. She didn’t know what to do with herself and the twisted feelings gnawing at her guts.

It felt like a dark hole that might swallow her whole if she stumbled–and all Riley did lately was stumble.

She couldn’t stop thinking about those drawings.

The harsh sketches had imprinted themselves in the back of her mind and would not go away.

Those shadowy figures, those reaching fingers, taking and taking even though Calla had nothing to give them but herself.

Riley couldn’t stop thinking about how she recognized herself in them, how she’d triggered one of Calla’s deepest fears.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Calla .

So maybe that was why, when there was nowhere left to roam, Riley found herself at the brig’s door.

She stared at it, heart pounding, palms sweating inside of her gloves.

Inside of Calla’s gloves. Where before they’d felt like a second skin, now they felt foreign, as if Riley had no right to them anymore.

They stayed on as she pushed the door open.

Its hinges creaked, loud as a betrayal. As she walked past the empty prison bars, Riley wondered about why she was there at all.

To twist the knife in? To see the damage she caused?

To figure out why she felt like crumbling when she was supposed to feel nothing at all?

Before any answers came to her, she reached the one occupied cell. A chair stood in front of the bars, as if someone had been visiting and they were expecting to return, to linger.

Inside of her cell, Calla was awake.

Lamps flickered from the walls of the brig, their light hitting the prison bars. Only one half of Calla’s face was illuminated, the other in shadow. The combined bright and dark of her blue eyes was both startling and unsettling as her gaze settled on Riley.

“Riley,” Calla said, unaffected, as if they were back during the days of Patch’s imprisonment and Riley was an expected visitor. Perhaps a secretly welcome one.

Riley didn’t figure that was true now.

But she was still herself, and, not knowing what else to do, she settled into her old skin, familiar and deeply uncomfortable.

She let a smirk slip on her lips as she turned the chair around and sat on it backwards.

Her arms rested against the backseat, hands hanging in the open air between them.

Slowly, her smirk spread into a small grin, as if she’d tried to suppress it and couldn’t.

She hated how easy the deceiving felt. She wished she could deceive herself.

“So how long is the sentence for humans?” She tilted her head inquisitively. “Patch got one fortnight. I don’t suppose you’ll get out that fast?”