Chapter 58:

  Two days passed in numbing sameness. They tended the fire, ate the dried rations, and spoke of the past. And while Ael was pleased to hear about the truth of Nereida’s life, without having to parse out what was real and what wasn’t in her stories, she also saw her wife retreating inward. The siren missed her children so completely that she was becoming a shell of herself. The pying in the sand had been the st time her walls had come down. Ael watched her wife sit in the ocean, her skirt getting full of water and sand, staring out into the distance. Ael knelt beside the egg, the stupid, stupid egg.

  “What do I do?” she asked the egg, putting her hand on it. She missed her ship, her mast, and talking to the trees didn’t feel right. “She won’t make it two weeks like this.” The egg, as always, sat motionless, nothing more than it appeared to be. “Some help you are,” she muttered angrily. “That’s your mother, you know. Even if that isn’t what you wanted, what we wanted, it's what she is.”

  The weather was perfectly pleasant in the afternoons, though the mornings were chilly enough that they rushed to make a fire when they woke. Nereida would gather kindling and Ael would stack the wood from the night before. They broke branches down after breakfast each day to let them dry, and if they had not dried sufficiently, Nereida would sing. Her songs were angry, bitter sounds, and the water would boil inside the logs, filling the air with a sickly sweet scent. But she would take no comfort after she sang, and would instead go sit in the ocean, listening to music Ael could not hear. The ocean sang to its daughter, and Ael was worried the daughter would drown. The ocean is not tame.

  The wind was blowing eastward, carrying floral scents on it. Another isnd was nearby, near enough for the wind to sing the scents to them.

  “Can I sit with you Ner?” she asked softly.

  “You’ll get wet.” Nereida did not look up as she stared off at the horizon.

  “There are worse things.” Ael plopped into the water beside her wife, not even bothering to remove her jacket. It would dry. There were worse things than being wet. “You aren’t alright.” No question, no chance for her wife to lie to her, lie to herself.

  Nereida went still as ice, barely breathing.

  “Egaz knew,” she whispered. “He… I think he is a Star Reader.” Her voice was thick with emotions, and while Ael knew her wife better now, there were too many to parse, except worry.

  “Are you sure?” Ael pced her hand on her wife’s knee. “Kids say strange things all the time.”

  “He’s been insistent that you and I were going to have a daughter. Took Basiano’s wee one for ours. And… he knew we were not going to see him in the morning. The way he said goodbye… the sombre little face…” She curled her knees up, resting her chin on the wet fabric of her skirt. “And I didn’t listen, didn’t hear him.”

  “Love…” Ael wanted to say something profound, but found she had no words to offer. So instead, she looked at the ocean, at the light glittering on the waves. In the distance, a fish jumped out. What drove fish to jump from their homes? She had no answer to that either, and so simply took off her jacket and draped it over Nereida. “Evander says that Star Readers are mostly hacks. It is so very rare, why would you think our boy had it?”

  “How often do sirens and demons make babies?” she asked angrily, smming her hand into the ocean, spshing Ael. Minnows that had been curious about the strange shadows they made suddenly fled in fear. Instincts protected them.

  “He’s yours, love. Of course he is exceptional.” Ael kissed her cheek softly. “Who put him in you makes no difference. The other was what?”

  “Seliniak,” she replied, grabbing a small pebble from beneath the surf. Nereida threw the pebble with all her might. “Not Dragon-blooded. He was too mundane, too … he couldn’t feel it when I sang. He didn’t know what I was, that I had a gift. He might as well have been blind and deaf.” She threw another pebble, this one farther than the first. It did not make as satisfying of a plop when it went beneath the waves. “I took his life, and he left me with one inside. Maybe.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about him. About then. It hurts.”

  “I know, love.” She took Nereida’s wet, sandy hand, and pressed it to her side, lifting her tunic so the siren could feel her scar. It was a thick scar, ropey, and it ached when she had to row, the skin stretching.

  There was a moment while Nereida touched the tissue, and Ael tried not to flinch away.

  “I saw this, our wedding night. I didn’t touch it…” she looked over at Ael, her voice raw. “You haven’t told me about this one.”

  “I was eight.” She closed her eyes against the pain of the memory. “There was an eclipse. A lunar eclipse.” She took a breath. “I was afraid. My teachers told me it was dangerous, because on the night of the eclipse, the Moon shows all her faces…. But my father insisted; said they were rare, and this one was something called a Blood Moon, nothing to be afraid of but spectacur to behold.”

  She let Nereida pull her hand away from the scar, let her wind their hands together.

  “It was beautiful,” Ael admitted. “I was tired, and I fell asleep…Father woke me just in time to watch the moon disappear behind a shadow, to watch the moon be encased in red light. It was the first time I felt a whisper of something, of an instinct that I could not pce. I ignored it at first, the feeling of danger, of needing to hide. I considered myself brave. Brave like my father, who was Captain of the Queen’s guards.”

  Ael looked back at the minnows, who were swimming back again now that the humans were still. Curious little things, minnows. “My teacher was on the roof then, and I remember being afraid to see him. I knew something was wrong. I… I was right, but too slow to act on it. He stabbed my mother, she went down hard. There was blood and she screamed at me to run. Father wounded him, but…” she let out a long, slow breath. “He ended my father quickly and came after me. I knew I couldn’t run, couldn’t hide. The instincts that warred inside me told me to stay and stand and fight, while my heart screamed at me to run. My mother, dying, screamed at me to run. But I saw our spygss, forgotten on the ground. I grabbed it as he came toward me, swung it at his head as hard as I could. He stabbed into me, twisting the bde, but I had stepped to the side to try and hit him. It hurt, it hurt more than anything I had ever known or have known since. But he died, and I lived. I held my mother’s hand as she died, until someone, I don’t recall who, whisked me inside, took me to a surgeon. I lived.”

  Nereida held her hand tightly, her grip never waning.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I wanted to die, the nights that followed.” Ael leaned into her wife, scaring the poor, curious minnows. “But I desperately want you to not die, to not waste away, to not shut me out.” Nereida stiffened at first, and then her whole body seemed to melt. She leaned in, kissing Ael’s forehead.

  “I’m grieving, love, but I’m not going to leave. I have too many reasons to be in this world to want to seek the next.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “They cut my line off that night, even though I survived,” Ael admitted softly. “The injury….”

  The wind shifted, changing the tempo of the ocean’s waves. Nereida smiled sadly.

  “I will try and let you in when I’m hurting, Ael,” the siren said. “So that nothing in our retionship scars as heavily as that injury.” She closed her eyes, thought Ael could not tell if it was to ward off tears or an unwanted thought. “The ship won’t be here before the new moon.” Ael swallowed.

  “I’d tracked that, yeah.”

  “You need to sleep beneath it, love.” Nereida stood, her skirt nearly coming down with the extra weight of the water. “You can’t heal until you let yourself. And that means facing the moon when she grieves… like you did with me now.” She held out her hand. Ael took it, standing up. She took her beloved in her arms, held her tightly.

  “I can face it if I’m not alone,” Ael managed.

  “You won’t be alone, I promise.”

  Things improved for them after the hard conversation. Over the next few days, Nereida opened up and spoke about the boys, about giving birth to them, about watching them take their first steps. She was so proud of them, and her eyes lit up in a way they did with no other subject. Ael told her stories of Epelda growing up, about how she had once broken her arm by trying to jump from one rigging to another. She told stories of Evander and Dymion doting on Epelda when she was young, buying her dresses that the young girl quickly learned to tie so that she could still jump and climb. How most of the crew liked the girl, but were unable to really connect with her.

  “When Alejo signed to her, it was… he touched her heart.” Ael finished. Nereida smiled.

  They still struggled to survive, working hard at keeping firewood stocked, though Nereida no longer boiled away the water from inside the wood. Her songs were more hopeful now. They dealt with rain, huddling together under their canopy, the egg in between them. It still buzzed with magic.

  At night, before they would settle, before they would spend time cuddled, Nereida would tell the egg a story and sing it a lulby. There was no magic to her lulby, just a simple melody. It seemed to be about the moon and the ocean coming together to heal their wounds.

  “I know you now as I knew you then

  My love, my heart, my mind

  We will join again you’ll see

  For our fate is yet kind.”

  The wives received a visit on the fourth day from a young woman, who had to be about Epelda’s age. She was short and solid looking, and carried a spear. She was a Gatherer, and knew pnt lore about the isnd. She taught them about three pnts they could eat here, all root vegetables. The flowering pnts would bear edible fruit but it was too early in the season. She taught them how to dig them up, how to find them and how to cook them. She was not a social creature, kept her words to a minimum, and taught by showing and doing.

  It was only as she was leaving that she paused at the shoreline, and gnced back at them.

  “Almost forgot.” She shrugged, took a step forward and then kept talking. “Ship on the way.” And without another word she headed back into the sea. Ael felt Nereida crash into her, and the two of them held each other tightly.

  The ship was coming.

  They could go home.