He steps back. One hand reaches, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I hope the bath helps.”
But my mind is caught by his words.
Not alone.
I had felt so, so alone in those last moments on the dock, with them all there. Laughing, and reaching for me with metal hands. Alone in my fear and my rage, as I had screamed out at them in wordless anguish.
But I wasn’t alone. Callan was there. Even if I didn’t know it, he wasthere.
He had tried.
My feet cross the room before I can think, and I wrap my fingers around his arm as he turns away. The warm muscle flexes as he stops, his hand on the door and his head lowered.
“You were wrong.” I search his face. “It matters. To me, it matters.”
“I’m glad,” he says hoarsely. “I should get back up there. Check in on everything.”
“Of course.” Long seconds pass before I pull my fingers away from his skin.
And I sense the warmth of him even after he’s gone. As the door swings open, Esme jumps back, clutching the items in her hands to her chest. “Gods, you scared me. Why were you standing there? Are you alright?”
I rub my fingers together. My stomach flutters. “I don’t know.”
***
Esme rests her head back on the edge of the barrel, her arms wrapped around her knees. “Gods, this is bliss. I thought I’d be more filth than anything else until we reached Asteria.”
I push through the last button on another of Callan’s shirts. I had opened the chest at the end of his bed to find a small stack, neatly folded with slices already made down the back, and a note in scrawling calligraphy.Use these.
My cheeks still feel the warmth from earlier as I turn to her, tugging my damp hair out of the shirt’s collar. My eyes snag onthe soap I brought with me. It sits on the bedside table—still unused, I realize. That faint, spiced scent coming from Callan’s shirt lingers on my own skin now. “Would you like me to rinse your hair?”
She groans. “Yes. Please. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind.” I use the crate to kneel, and she hands me the flagon.
Esme sighs as I tilt her head back, then dip the flagon into the water and pour it over her hair before carefully sliding my finger into the wet curls to massage her scalp. “You’re good at this. There’s wild hazel oil on the bed that I use.”
My lips tilt up. Collecting the oil, I follow her murmured instructions and pour a small pool into my hands, massaging them together before running my fingers through her curls, teasing them into individual springs. “My sisters used to do this for me. They taught me to do the same.”
Nyx in particular had a penchant for having her hair washed, until she had grown impatient with the tangled strands and cut it off in one impulsive sweep using Deva’s shears. Esme’s eyes crack open. “I lost my sister on the day of the Shift. Myra. She was in one of the ships that didn’t make it to the dock. My parents too. Everyone, really. Of all of us, none of our families made it through. Rio had a cousin on the dock, but he threw himself in to try to save some of the fallen.”
I pause. “I’m sorry.”
She sighs. “You don’t have to say that, but I appreciate it. Not after what the Caelumnai did to you.”
I consider it. “I can still have empathy for your loss, while grieving my own. Grief touches us all, one way or another. It would be foolish to believe that mine somehow means more than yours, no matter how it occurred.”
I am not such a fool as to think that every man, woman and child from Boreas was responsible for the loss of my sisters.Perhaps I might have thought that, once. For a long time, I had pictured the Caelumnai as a seething, moving mass that swallowed us up so easily. I had pictured us as lights, winking out one by one.
That’s how they appeared in my nightmares. As a dark, unending force, creeping over Asteria, smothering us until I woke up screaming and fighting to free myself from tangled, sweat-soaked sheets.
The reality, I am learning, is not so simple.
“Such a waste,” Esme says quietly. “All of it. For what, in the end?”
I study her damp curls, plastered against her head, before rinsing them again and repeating the oil. “Will you tell me more about Asteria? What to expect?”
Her eyes glance up at me. Bright, vivid violet. Although there’s no shifting of her iris, no sign of the maegis that sits dormant. “Of course. How much has Callan told you?”
