Page 11 of The Withering Dawn
“For now, no.”
“And our prisoner? Ye lookin’ to sell her?”
When the idea was said out loud again, my whole body tensed. I slipped on my coat and let out another long breath.
“Do you think we should?”
“Aleksi says the governor of Dornwich has a thing for tongues. He’s paying more for live sirens than dead ones these days. The governor of Treson Harbor is rumored to be following suit.”
I frowned at the thought.
“Suppose we have a big bounty on our hands,” I said, cringing internally at the statement. “Not that we need it. How much did we pull from that ship?”
“More than enough to keep us livin’ easy for a long while,” he gleamed. “The real treasure is the fact we stole it from Antonio.”
He was right. That was a thought I could revel in. We had plenty of gold to last, which meant selling her would just be an act of cruelty.
Cathal and I stood quietly for a moment, thoughts going unsaid between us. When we finally made eye contact again, I could see that he was feeling hesitant. So was I.
“She’s a bit thin, yeah?” he said, tossing the coiled ropes to the side. “You think she needs to eat someone to put some meat on her bones?”
“How should I know? We’re pirates, not hunters. We know so little about her kind.”
“Do you think hunters know how to care for them? Don’t they just behead them? Or bring them straight to shore and get paid?"
I pinched the bridge of my nose and looked up at the sails. The wind was getting stronger. We could reach a town or port in a week at that rate.
“We have a few days to think about everything,” I said. “Until then, we keep her fed. We’ll restock everything when we get to shore.”
Cathal nodded and continued his work as I headed down to the galley to grab a few basic food items. I took a couple slices of bread for myself as well as a stack of dried beef strips, a mug of bone broth, and water. I arrived in the hold where the woman was now curled in the back corner of the cell again, awake. I approached, setting the mug and a strip of beef right inside the bars. She eyed it, expressionless.
“You must eat more,” I said. “You’re far too thin.”
She pulled the blanket over her shoulders, but she didn’t move. Everything she did contradicted what I imagined sirens to be like. They were supposed to be fierce. Terrifying. Dangerous. This woman was none of those things. She was delicate and broken. But it added to the idea that she was trying to appeal to a part of me that wanted to show mercy and that didn’t escape me.
I stood, assuming she’d take the food once I left, and headed back to my cabin. Nikolas had taken the helm again and I nodded at him as I walked across the deck. He was barely older than Oliver had been and he loved nothing more than being at the wheel navigating the waters. Now that Oliver was gone, he was the youngest of us.
“Stay ahead of the storm if you can,” I ordered. “I’m going to see to the documents I could salvage off that damn ship.”
He nodded in reply.
I holed up in my cabin for the rest of the day, the papers and ledgers from the sunken ship spread across my oak desk. I didn’t have time to notice what I was taking with me when I raided the captain’s cabin, so it was all a bit of a puzzle. I was looking for travel routes. Acargo log. Anything that I could use. After an hour of sifting through seemingly pointless notes and records, I started to put some things together.
The ship was called the Perry Smith and it was old. It had gone through at least a dozen owners from what I could gather, but none of them seemed keen on keeping adequate records of their doings. Or at least, I didn’t manage to pick any up in my haste. Antonio himself wasn’t even mentioned and it tested my patience.
I did, however, have a leather journal in my possession, the pages of which had been stained and smeared from my plunge into the sea. To my luck, I could make out at least a few sections of writing. Much of it was the ramblings of a man with too many scattered thoughts in his head, but a few visible entries were coherent enough to make sense of.
Jacob Emry says this is the test. Philip failed the test. He let the monster infect him. He let the darkness in. I fear he set back many months of work, for now the monster has shed blood, tainting her soul and violently confusing everyone else’s.
Perhaps we are lost now. I do not…
The words smeared together and I flipped to another legible page.
We keep them so the world is saved. We keep them weak. Small. We keep them clean so we are clean. We are pure because their reach cannot go beyond these iron bars. Jacob has preached this many times and I believe our work here is valuable.
I moved to another legible entry.
The older one perished today. She ascends where her sisters will soon follow. The red-haired one looks at the body like she is empty and I fear I cannot save that one. She will die next. We have not fed her for many days. Any human flesh in her stomach is long gone now. She will die pure like the other one.
