“I am not allowing you to be—”
“You’re not allowing anything. Please, Vidar. Until I know more.”
The way her eyes pleaded made me weak. If one thing was true, it was that I would do anything for Dahlia. If she wanted to sleep separately, I would honor that, because the fear bleeding off her was too real to dismiss. It was tearing her apart. Every day shewas losing a piece of herself to whatever hellish forces were at play. The least I could do was not be another battle for her to fight.
“Fine,” I agreed. “Now, come. Before anything, I need to put Gus to rest.” Turning, I found David and Billy dragging the boat further onto the beach. “You two,” I pointed. “Go on ahead to the treehouse. There is a stash there of rum. The good kind. Bring it into the camp, would you? We’ll all be along.”
The boys immediately started trekking into the green along a narrow walking path. As the two youngest on my crew, I hated knowing the kind of battles we were about to face, but there was no easy way around it. David had nowhere to go and Billy was a product of the sort of violence no young boy should ever know. Fighting was in their blood as much as it was in mine. Age didn’t matter on the sea or on a ship. Not the way it did otherwise.
“Mullins,” I called out, waving him over to me.
He left Meridan sitting in the shade of a thick palm and strode to my side as other members of the crew began lugging supplies inland.
“Cap’n.”
“Let’s put the old man in a proper hole,” I said.
He nodded and the two of us bent to grab hold of the blanket Gus was lying on. He would be buried inland. Not by the sea that had caused him so much grief.
The hike wasn’t long. Just far enough for anything from the sea to question the worth of venturing out of the water. Meridan, Dahlia, and Aeris were careful, as instructed, to not touch the foliage. There was a chance any of the plants could be hemsbane. It was a subtle plant. One with thin, tall stems and long, narrow leaves. A simple brush against the skin didn’t do much to a siren, according to my father’s journals, but the milk of a cut leaf did plenty and with my men stomping about, we couldn’t be too careful. The three sirens walked cautiously, glancing from one side to the other to avoid any unwanted contact. Behind us, four of my men carried the cage with the fourth, less desirable siren lockedinside. I didn’t give a damn if they were to accidentally drop her in a crop of hemsbane. I would only regret the delay it would cause.
When we finally came to a clearing beside a shallow creek, my men and Nazario’s crew were quick at work setting up spaces to sleep and build campfires. Near a narrow waterfall was a treehouse barely built off the ground against a thick, gnarly trunk that had long been dead but was reclaimed by vines and weeds. Billy and David had two crates of rum stacked at the bottom of the steps, ready.
Mullins and I set Gus near the trunk of a tree beside which two other grave markers made of wood stood in the ground. Shovels had already been laid beside the graves, ready for us. I shrugged off my coat and tossed it aside along with my shirt, ridding myself of the damp, stifling fabric before we got to work.
Every time I jammed the shovel into the soil, I knew I was saying goodbye to the only other person who knew what happened that night on those cursed islands. The night I killed my father. The only man who understood the horrors of the sea the way I did. We rarely talked about it throughout the years, but the silent knowing that we’d both endured the same nightmare had somehow been a comfort over the years. A comfort I didn’t know I needed until it was gone.
But Gus knew what I was capable of before I did. He knew from the beginning and I was certain, if he was standing beside one of those trees smoking his pipe, he’d tell me I could bear the burden of losing him just fine. Like I had carried the burden of killing my father and watching his crew get ripped apart. He would smack me across the face like he did when I was only fifteen and tell me, “You harden your heart if you have to. You make it hard as bone because this world will tear anything softer to pieces, boy.”
I almost smiled to myself, the sting of that slap tickling my cheek like it had only just happened. Whether I buried Gus six feet underground or not, I knew he’d be sticking around one way or another.
It’s impossible to speak the mind.
The mind has a language only it can understand.
~Unknown
Come nightfall, Gus was no longer lying on a blanket wrapped in linen. He was in the ground between two palm trees that stood at an angle toward each other like an archway. A natural arch under which more than one person was buried judging by the two other markers made of crude wood and cruder carvings.
The entire crew of the Weaver gathered around. Even a few from the Amanacer stood just close enough to pay their respects for a man they didn’t even know.
Vidar had been working tirelessly until the sun had disappeared behind the horizon. His sun-tanned skin glistened with sweat and beside him, Mullins’ deep umber skin was gleaming with the same exertion. The island was a humid place and the sun had been merciless that day, but the deed was finally done. PoorGus was in the ground, his pipe placed neatly at the base of a wooden plank with his name carved into it.
“I shouldn’t feel this way about an old man I barely knew,” Meridan said next to me. She was sitting on a barrel, her leg still weakened by her wound.
“Every death takes a stone from our withering foundation,” I said.
“Voel. Kea. That girl you tried to save. Now Gus.”
“We will lose far more in the days to come.”
I could see Meridan turn her head at that in my peripheral. “I don’t want to.” She stood, her hand pressed to her sore thigh.
“Meri—”
“I want to be near Mullins.” She lowered her pale eyes and I could feel her heart wilting in her chest like it was my own. “He wept in front of me today. I don’t think he meant to, but he did. I don’t think we truly understood what Gus meant to them.”
“Do you want to?”
