Page 12 of The Withering Dawn
I read on, pulling a lit candle nearer as the sun began to sink behind the thickening clouds outside.
She spoke today. Her voice was so beautiful. So soft. So haunting. I almost touched her, but I resisted that madness. It is part of hercharm. These she-demons are tainted with it. She tries to put her spell on me every day and… I was almost pained to watch the men cut her tongue again.
She screamed this time…
But we cannot allow anything to steer us off this path. God wants us to cleanse her. Her screams and her pleading eyes are a test and we will not falter. Not when we are so close to setting her soul free of that corrupted vessel that has imprisoned it. It is clear no amount of conditioning will make her into something she is not. A monster is a monster.
The rest of the passage was smeared, almost beyond my ability to read it.
Her name… she spoke it before we took her tongue again. Aeris. I dare say, I think this is the hardest test… feels wrong. It has given her an identity and I fear I will fail God by… but do I care…magics infecting my…
She must die. I think someone… She should have joined her friend by now, but she fights on. I don’t…
I flipped through the pages, too fixated on the rest of the entries to give up, but the water had taken so much of the ink away.
There were only a few lines left near the end of the journal, smudged but readable.
…It washed up in the nets, already dead. We don’t know what it is… rumors from towns… it is a vile thing. Possessed. Even Aeris fears it. She cowered from it when we dumped it in the… God help us.
From there, I could not make out more than a letter here and there. I wanted so much more, but it was something at the very least. A small bit of insight I didn’t have before.
Aeris. I spoke the name in my head as I closed the journal and slid it away from me. I didn’t even know who’d written those words. That name was lost to the damage done to the paper. All I knew was that someone was battling thoughts of hurting the woman I had locked just beneath my feet.
I related to him, whoever he was. I leaned back in my chair, twirling a thick, gold ring on my index fingers like I usually did when I was deep in thought.
Aeris, I thought again. The writer of the journal had one thing right. A name gave her an identity. She wasn’t just a woman in a cell. She was a woman with a name. A face. I imagined her writhing and screaming as men with blades forced open her jaw to slice out her tongue. How many times had it been done? How many times had she endured the mutilation?
And how much of it was Antonio involved with? He was certainly cruel enough that trafficking a siren woman and signing off on her torture was believable. But for all I knew, the twisted fucks on the Perry Smith were leasing the ship from him and he had nothing to do with the things they did with it. But then why were they flying his sigil?
I groaned softly and rubbed my fingers over my brows, massaging away a minor headache. We were heading toward land with a siren on board. We could make a good amount of money off of selling her, no doubt, but the idea was putrid, leaving a thick sludge behind every time it crossed my mind, especially considering we didn’t need the money. We’d gotten more than enough from the zealots. That, and no matter what she was, I couldn’t imagine surrendering her to someone else that would continue to mutilate her for the rest of her life.
My gut was telling me one thing and my head was telling me another. Both had served me well in the past and both had led me astray.
Perhaps I could let her go. I could open her cell and let her jump into the sea and never see her again, though I wasn’t sure why she didn’t choose to leave when I gave her the chance in the first place. I considered for a moment that she was scared of that monstrous thing that was in the hold with her and perhaps that was the reason she had not fled. In that case, perhaps I should be more cautious as we sailed further into hunting territory.
Night was creeping up on us again as I made my way out onto the deck. My men were furling the sails and it wasn’t hard to see why once I caught a glimpse of the sky. The clouds had grown angry and loomed like hungry giants above us. The wind was starting to make the ocean churn. The Amanacer was a sturdy ship. She was old and built to withstand the motion of the waves even on the worst days, so I wasn’t too worried about the weather. In fact, a little delay due to drifting for a while might be good considering my dilemma. It gave me more time to think.
I rolled my shoulder back, testing my mobility. I was glad to know my wound wasn’t hindering me too much. It felt tight and sore, but generally better considering. Henry had done good work so I began helping my men secure the deck in case the winds picked up. Rain began to trickle down in a misty form, blowing diagonally across the ship and wetting my face.
It felt damn good. Like a splash of cold water in the morning, it woke up my body and pulled me from that dark pit of crowded thoughts that I’d been wading through for hours.
“Looks like it’ll be a rocky one!” Aleksi shouted as he rolled a barrel toward the railing to tie it off.
“Ye’ll open your stitches liftin’ that!” Cathal added as I hoisted a pile of thick, heavy ropes away from the mast to close in a crate.
“Ahh,” I brushed him off. “Then Henry will stitch me up again.”
A few other men continued to prepare the Amanacer for high winds, above and below deck. For the most part, my crew never needed instruction. They knew the ship as well as I did and they took care of her like she took care of them.
“So?” Cathal asked as the rain began to pick up. “Learn anything?”
I climbed the steps to the helm and took the wheel from Nikolas for the first time in the last three days.
“Zealots,” I said to him. “From what I could gather, they were not a merchant ship. They were fanatics following the word of God. In their own way,” I shrugged. “No sign of Antonio’s whereabouts.”
“And the woman?”
“They were trying to kill her. And they seemed willing to perish with her if they had to. Starving her to death, I suppose, was their way of making sure she died without the flesh of men in her stomach. A purification, I think.”
