“Now you’re a priest?”
“You are damned. You know this. They know this. They all know.”
“Piss off.”
“They fear you. They hate you. Every smile is a lie.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“He serves his master. You are no kin. He has his task.”
“Go away.”
“They let you live for fear. Nothing more. You’re not their captain. Never were. All a lie.”
“Go. Away.”
“No woman. No human. No soul.”
“Go away.”
“Damned. Monster. Devil. Misbred.”
“Go away!”
Twenty-Three
She woke in the cold, damp darkness that had marked all of her nights for a month. Overhead, the sky was flickering sickly green. The voice still echoed in her head:Monster. Devil.Toinette stared across the sand at nothing and held still.
The men slept in the shelter. She and Erik slept outside, each off to one side: sentries, harder to kill than most of the crew. Toinette had volunteered shortly after she and Erik had returned. Nobody had spoken against the idea.
Turning her head, she could make out the figure on real sentry watch: Raoul, that night. He still looked hale enough. As she watched, he scratched the back of his head. All was, if not ever well, as well as the island got.
It was a dream. Go back to sleep.
When she closed her eyes, she saw the faces again: Jehan, Gervase, the man she’d stabbed in Mecklenburg, the bodies from plague carts, her mother. The dead lips spoke again, their writhing splashed in paintings across her mind.
“Shit,” she muttered, and got to her feet.
Quiet as she was, Raoul was alert—good lad—and turned to meet her eyes. “Captain?”
“Can’t sleep. Walking a bit.” She saw the recognition in his eyes. None of them were sleeping easily of late.Thatwas just what a crew already wound wire-tense needed, but there was nothing to do about it. They needed the wine to make the water good. “Don’t mind me.”
“Yes, Captain,” he said, and turned back to his duty: still obedient, still earnest, as though that would save him.
They all made their own armor. Sence’s was his faith, John’s and Samuel’s magic, hers… She wished she knew. Duty usually sufficed; duty was a damned poor fabric when she kept suspecting they’d be better off without her.
She walked. She tried not to look at the sky, and failed.
Erik slept behind a semicircle of rocks, shielded from the wind. Halfway there, Toinette realized her destination, shrugged, and kept on. Making sure he was safe would do as well as anything else for a task.
She suspected that seeing him might calm her too, but she didn’t want to dwell on that.
By the time she reached the ring of stones, she knew that Erik’s sleep wasn’t easy either. The sound of his body tossing back and forth came in unsteady counterpoint to his frantic breathing. When Toinette did stand above him and look down, she saw his brow wet with sweat and his eyes moving frantically beneath their lids.
She knelt and put a hand on his shoulder.
Instantly his hand clamped around her wrist in a bruising grip. He was half up off the ground, grabbing her by the shoulder, before he fully woke; then Erik froze, his wide eyes staring into hers, his mouth stilled mid-oath.
