I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. A seed is planted in my mind, a sprouting hope of power regained. I find myself smiling.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say, crouching down beside her.
She reaches out to touch my hair and seems surprised when I don’t flinch away. She gently brushes it out of my face and in my periphery I can see a few locks, dark as they were before the binding.
‘You had sunshine hair, but now it’s back to midnight hair,’ Biba says.
I remember the energy pulsing between us down in the captain’s quarters.
‘Your daughter is blessed, isn’t she?’ I ask, standing up.
Ris and Finlyr are poised like animals about to fight or flee.
‘I was a priestess. I’m not afraid of her, and neither should you be.’
I don’t need them to like me, just to trust me. For now.
‘She is touched,’ Ris says, and I can see she is ill at ease with the notion.
‘It is a gift,’ I reassure her.
‘You were raised at the temple,’ she says after a time.
I nod.
‘What . . . what was it like there?’
Ris’s question has a weight to it, as though my answer could shatter her. She is hanging on my every word; I feel Biba watching me. She is hungry for knowledge of a place where there are others like her. I’m conscious of my face, my mannerisms.
I try to smile at Biba. ‘It taught me a great deal. It was the only home I ever knew.’
The half-truth feels like poison on my tongue, but Ris looks relieved. She brings her daughter into a tight embrace. There’s a fierce protection there that eclipses the fear radiating off her. I shuffle the pieces in my mind, wondering what Biba’s gift could have to do with their being on a contract for the Bastion.
Sinigang slinks up to me and settles by my feet. I catch him surreptitiously looking at me out of the corner of one half-lidded eye. I am tempted to put up the wall, to dance around the naked truth. I have given them morsels of truth, enough to trust me. I shield my face with my shroud of hair, a dark reminder of who I used to be. It’s as though their realisation of what I am has released a dam built against acknowledging my crimes, and now my chest is being crushed by the weight of water. I have survived by ignoring the shadow in the corner of my mind.
‘The undead crew all have names, you know,’ Sinigang says casually.
I turn to stare at him.
‘Not what they were called in life,’ he continues, ‘but the children hold a great affection for them.’
‘That’s . . . macabre.’
‘Any more macabre than what you did?’
I think of Pocket and the future I had imagined for him when I freed him from his cage in the Bastion library. It had given me solace to think of him unbound, untamed, free to make anywhere his home and owned by no one.
‘What can you feel?’ Sinigang asks, his intense expression making my skin prickle. His words are so gentle that they are a death by a thousand cuts, and I’m caught in a reverie. I am compelled to answer him truthfully, as though he is weaving a truth spell with his look.
‘Nothing,’ I confess.
‘You were no petty witch. You were a priestess. I don’t think you would accept that fate.’
‘I should be dead. I’d rather be dead.’
Soft as a gentle breeze, he admits, ‘You still reek of magic. It’s faint but it’s there.’
I close my eyes and feel for any ember of magic. His energy is in the distance, so close and yet out of reach. It’s the rumble of thunder and lightning striking, an approaching storm. I feel him underneath my hand, his wet fur on my fingers. He’s letting me touch him. I can feel his heartbeat, slow like crashing waves upon a beach. I yearn for it, so much I want to push my hand through his flesh and bone until I can touch it. The fact I can feel him, even faintly, is torture. My desire to take from him if I could terrifies me.
