Twenty-Five
As with so much since he’d boarded the Hawk, Erik was new to night watch. The benefits of rank had meant he’d never had to be sentry, even in times of war, and he’d been a passenger on the ship, not one of the crew. He hadn’t balked at Marcus’s not-really-request. Every man had to pull his weight, and the dreams weren’t letting him sleep very well as it was.
Telling time was hard, as their travel had put the moon and the stars in different places. The flickering green light was back in the sky that night too, and it obscured the stars at times. By the time the sandglass from the ship was halfway empty on Erik’s watch, he thought it was somewhat past midnight, but he had no way of knowing for sure.
Truly, it didn’t matter. His watch would pass when it passed. He’d wake Samuel and then get what sleep he could. When the sun rose, they’d all wake and the day would start. The time of the outside world was unimportant.
Sitting and watching the sea, with the fire’s banked embers in the shelter behind him and the witch light in the sky, Erik could easily believe all of the outside world unimportant—even a dream, at times.
It was a more pleasant dream than the ones he had while sleeping. He’d grown almost used to talking corpses, but that in itself was unsettling.
He’d grown almost used to too many things.
The conversation with Marcus came back to him. If they did stay—if they had to stay—then what? Breed themselves like horses and hope to have daughters who could pair with the men? Would they even have the necessary materials for the rites? And wouldn’t any resulting families be far inside the lines of consanguinity with each other?
Granted, plenty of noble families ignored the Church’s guidelines about cousins; still, Erik didn’t like the thought.
The sky flickered green again, the color of rotting flesh, reminding him once more that the past was not only years but miles away. Below it, the shadows stretched out into odd proportions and danced spasmodically along the sand. The sea roared in and out in front of Erik; behind him, the fire was almost dead and even he could make out no sound from the shelter.
His sword hung at his side. In a breath, he could have twenty such swords, not to mention the other advantages of his dragon form.
Sitting alone in the night, he found that such knowledge helped him as little as did prayer.
* * *
The cottage stood empty but solid, with mud filling the gaps between logs and small pine branches forming a roof, parting in the middle for a hole to let smoke out. The next task was to stack wood at one end, that there might be enough to sustain them during a blizzard; in time, they’d put stores of food in the same place.
Carrying out such plans still felt like surrender. They might seek a way off the island, but they were all coming to accept that they’d likely be trapped at least through winter, as the weather would cut them off on its own if they broke the spell too late in the year. Even so, Toinette was finding a certain contentment in the hewing, shaping, and stacking of wood, as she did in catching and drying fish or digging roots, and a satisfaction when she watched the stores of food grow or eyed the sturdy cabin walls.
As a city child, she’d had little of that feeling, save for the rare occasions when her message-running and her mother’s sewing had actually filled the little leather purse they kept beneath their pillows. She’d come to know it more as a captain, looking with satisfaction over neat account books and well-stocked holds; she’d never spared a thought for whether it was possible in other trades.
Stacking logs while Samuel and Raoul cut, Toinette startled herself with the notion that the clearing wouldn’t have been so bad in a normal place. Yes, the woods were uncanny: the voices and their half-formed words hadn’t gotten any rarer, and the strange light flickered in the sky every few nights. Her dreams featured crawling corpses, and what they said was no more kind than it ever had been. The island was not a good place.
The clearing might have been a good place, otherwise. With a wide swath of the plants slashed away, burnt, or eaten—or stored to be food or firewood later—the pines and moss-covered stones reminded Toinette of the forests around Loch Arach.
She’d been happy there, due only in part to better room and board. There she’d learned to control her body’s deadly potential. There too, for the first and last time in her life, she’d been among people who’d known all of what she was and taken it as not only acceptable but commonplace. Toinette’s life since had held its share of joy, but never had there been so little need for concealment.
The first night after she’d left Loch Arach, she’d curled herself up on a flea-ridden inn mattress and wept into her pillow, silently so that she wouldn’t wake the other guests. She had understood Artair’s decision, as she’d told Erik, just as she’d understood what Agnes had told her and why—but that understanding only deprived her of the comfort that anger would have provided.
Rage against heaven had never much appealed to her, and even if she took a liberal view of her own damnation, God had presumably made Artair MacAlasdair a lord, and herself the bastard on his doorstep—not even one of his own get. To blame him for acting accordingly, and soundly by any practical view, was the sort of luxury men like Erik could afford. Toinette never let herself expect anything else.
She’d had years of good food and education. She had skills to be going on with and knowledge of her own powers. Bless the slack, she’d told herself. Don’t curse the drop. Everything ends.
The thought had been less balm than Toinette hoped, but time and the distractions of a new life had eased the ache of parting. She’d learned to be happy despite concealment—it wasn’t that difficult—and had put from her mind any chance of finding again the honesty she’d been able to practice at Loch Arach.
Two centuries later, she straightened up with an armful of wood and realized that she had found it again, and more. Little else about the situation, or the island itself, was good—but, through force of circumstance, Toinette hadn’t needed to bother hiding her nature from anyone since they’d landed.
She leaned against the cabin walls and laughed until Raoul poked his head around the corner. “Captain?”
“I’m fine,” she said, though the earnest concern on his young face made her want to keep laughing even as it touched her heart. He might have been only worried that she’d run mad and would kill them all, or that she’d need to be taken care of, but his expression said otherwise. “I just… I realized how little I ever thought I’d wind up in a place like this, that’s all.”
Raoul laughed, nodding and clearly relaxing. The captain wasn’t having a hysterical fit, thank God. “Oui, I thought I’d taken my last sight of such houses,” he said, gesturing to the cabin, “and never that I’d be hunting for food again, or chopping wood. Though here there’s no bailiff’s wrath to fear—always a hidden blessing, my mother would say.”
“I was just thinking along those lines myself,” said Toinette. “Not about bailiffs, precisely.”
“No,” said Raoul, “I’d not imagine you ever feared anything from them.”
“Only because I didn’t live in the country.” She’d hidden from the constables on occasion as a child, though she’d not often resorted to picking pockets. “We’re none of us saints. I’m surely not.”
“Saints can come from all walks of life, so long as they repent.”
“Well—” Toinette began, intending a laughing remark on the subject of repentance, when an immense roar split the air.
She dropped the logs without a moment’s more thought and spun toward the source of the noise, sword already drawn. She heard crashing then, and a great deal of it—almost as much as she’d cause in dragon form.
Erik, she thought, and he had led Marcus and Franz northeast, where the noise was coming from. The roar hadn’t sounded like him, though: too guttural and somehow too wet.
Raoul and Samuel were by her side, Samuel with the ax he’d been using to chop wood and Raoul with his sword. “Go back,” she said to them. “Get everyone on the beach to shelter, and be ready to defend.”
“From what?” Samuel asked.
“I don’t know. I will soon enough.”