Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(77)

Home.

Homesickness so profound it scared her, seized her heart. She wanted to go home.

But that wasn’t an option.

Another vision filled her mind. Her mother, face dark as a thundercloud. Xiala, kneeling in a pool of blood not her own. The village elder, lips moving in a prayer turned curse as Xiala ran, tripping and stumbling, into the dark ocean, her tears mixing with the salt of the sea, as she swam for her life.

She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs and let tears silently flow from her eyes. After a while she fell back to sleep, but all that awaited her there were nightmares. Of blood not hers, and curses to flee, and, this time, black-winged birds.



* * *



Next time she woke, she was glad for it. She forced herself up immediately, washed her face with a moistened cloth, and drank a few gulps of precious water. Then she remembered that her crew was dead and there was plenty of water for only two people, and she upended the clay flask, swallowing until it was empty.

She found him sitting on her captain’s bench at stern, wrapped in his black robe, head down, forearms resting on bent knees, looking very human and very tired. She started to walk over and paused. Just to her right was the barrel of balché left over from the feast on Lost Moth. It had been shoved under a cloth tarp that had been blown ragged by the storm. She dragged off the remains of the tarp, grabbed the barrel, and walked over to sit across from the captain’s bench.

Serapio didn’t raise his head to acknowledge her, but he had to know she was there.

She thumbed the lid off the balché and tipped it back, letting some of the sour alcohol run down her throat. It hurt to swallow as the far-from-healed wound stretched, but the balché tasted so good that she didn’t mind. After another swallow, she held the barrel out to Serapio, tapping it against his knee.

“The drink from before on the sand,” he said quietly. “I recognize it. It smells terrible.”

“The smell doesn’t matter,” she said patiently. “It’s how it makes you feel afterward.”

“It’s alcoholic?”

“I hope so.”

He shook his head. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

She sighed, the only icebreaker she knew thwarted. “Well, more for me, then.” She tilted it back for another mouthful before setting the barrel on the bench beside her. She waited for him to say something, but he had fallen into silence again, a quiet that felt large, like he wished not to speak for a long time. Perhaps forever.

But already she was anxious. She had never been the one to let a conversational pause linger, always preferring to fill it when she could. But what should she say? Ask him if he spoke to birds and if he had meant for them to kill her crew? Inquire about his strange relationship with sudden eerie winds and disappearing suns? It all seemed preposterous and as unlikely as… well, as a woman who turned into a sea creature of legend. If she was honest, his apparent powers were no stranger than what had happened to her when she’d dived too deep to save Loob and the sea had transformed her. There was magic in the world, pure and simple, things she didn’t understand. Best get used to it.

She chuckled under her breath.

He lifted his head now, a clear question on his face.

She grinned, remembered he couldn’t see her, and said, “Here I was wondering what kind of unnatural creature you are, crow man, when I was abruptly reminded of my own peculiar nature.” She shrugged and rolled a finger around the edge of the balché barrel. “I think they call that pot and fry pan alike or something.”

His brow furrowed.

“Never mind,” she said. “A Cuecolan saying. Something about how you and I are more the same than different.”

Something in his shoulders relaxed, and a faint smile, just a lifting of lips, creased the corner of his mouth. “We are nothing alike, Xiala,” he said, and there was enough regret in it, enough longing, that it didn’t feel like an insult.

“You’re not so special, Obregi,” she said, but there was no heat to it.

Her gaze traveled around the ship, and she shivered. “All dead,” she said, her voice soft with something between disbelief and regret. She took in the bloodstained canoe, the decimated cargo, the ominous creak of the ship on waves, flat and unkind. Where have the bodies gone? she thought to herself. Did he remove them while I was unconscious? Throw them overboard? Or did the birds eat them all? Tendon and fat and muscle, picked down to bones. She shook the macabre image from her head. Surely he had simply thrown them overboard.

When he spoke, his voice was a rumble, a dark beating of wings. “Men die.”

She shivered and reached for the balché. “Yes, and thank you for assuring that it was not me. But…” Images came back unbidden. Callo’s eyeless sockets, Baat’s beak-shredded face. She shuddered and drank more, not caring that she was consuming too much too fast. “Perhaps next time you use a knife, yeah?”

Suddenly Serapio’s hands were holding hers, warm and firm. She blinked. He had moved so fast. Had he always moved that fast, or was she already drunker than she realized? And then Serapio’s face was inches from hers, so close his breath shivered across her lashes, making her blink. She thought passingly of how unerring his direction was even without seeing where she sat.

“I am sorry for your crew. They were never truly cruel to me, but they were going to kill you, and I could not let that happen.”