On Blue's waters

He dismissed the Common Tongue with a gesture. “Well, you don’t understand her at all.”

“Men never understand women.”

He laughed, and although I had not been angry with him a moment before there was something in that laugh that made me yearn to kill him.

I searched the waterline for Seawrack, and failing to find her probed the sea for her with the boat hook, which was absurd. After that, I wanted to return to the rocks where we had found her before, but Krait dissuaded me, giving me his word that she was still on the sloop, but telling me quite frankly that I would be a complete fool to search it for her, since finding her would be far worse than not finding her. Soon after that, he left.

To the best of my memory, it was already dark when she came out. I had long ago concluded that she was in one of the cargo chests, and was not at all surprised to see the lid of the one in which I kept rope and the like (the one on which I had sat) opened from within. I held up the little pan in which I had been cooking a fish and invited her to join me.

She sat down on the other side of the fire. I thanked her for it, since I could see her better there; and she looked surprised.

“Because I’ve been so worried about you,” I told her. “I didn’t know how badly you were hurt, and I thought you had to be getting hungry and thirsty.” I passed her the water bottle.

She drank and said, “Weren’t you hurt, too?”

It touched me as few things ever have. “No. I’m fine. I was exhausted, that’s all.”

She nodded, and drank again.

“You could have killed me while I slept, Seawrack. You could have found my knife and stabbed me to death with it.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I would have, in your place.” I put our last strip offish on a plate and handed it to her across the fire. “Do you want a fork?”

She said nothing, staring down at her small portion of fried fish, so I got her a fork as well. “That fish is just about all we have left,” I told her. “I should have brought more food.”

“You didn’t know about me.” She looked away from the fillet I had given her with something akin to horror. “I don’t want this. Can I give it to Babbie?”

He rose at the sound of his name and trotted around the box to her.

“Certainly, if you wish.” I watched Babbie devour the morsel of fish.

“I feel a little sick.”

“So do I. Do I have to tell you that I’m terribly, horribly, sorry for what I did to you? That I’ll never do anything like that again?”

“I sang for you,” she said, as if it explained everything.

Somewhere she is singing for me at this moment, singing as she used to before Krait came. I hear her, as I do almost every day, although she must surely be many hundreds of leagues away. I hear her-and when I do not I dream of my home beside the sea. Of it and of you, Nettle my darling, my only dearest, the sweetheart of my youth. But if ever I find my way back to it (as Seawrack has beyond any question found her way back to the waves and the spume, the secret currents, and her black, wave-washed rocks) there will come a stormy midnight when I throw off the blankets, although you and the twins are soundly sleeping. I will put out then in whatever boat I can find, and you will not see me more. Do not mourn me, Nettle. Every man must die, and I know what death I long for.

We buried alive an inhumu and two inhumas today, taking up three of the big flat paving stones in the marketplace-all that cruel business. One smiled at me, and I thought I saw human teeth. All three looked so human that I felt we were about to consign to the grave a living man and two living women. I insisted that they open their mouths so I could inspect them. The woman who had smiled would not, so hers was pried open with the blades of daggers; there were only blood-drinking fangs, folded against the roof of her mouth.

Inhumi are burned alive in Skany-I am very glad that I had to watch that only once. I have heard of the same thing being done in New Viron, and I admit that I would cheerfully have burned or buried the inhuma that bit Sinew when we were living in the tent. They are vile creatures, exactly as Hari Mau says; but how can they help it, when we are as we are? I wish sometimes that Krait had not told me.

So little, the last time I wrote. Nothing at all about Seawrack and Krait, the sloop, or the western mainland I call Shadelow; and it has been two days. If I continue at this rate, I will be the rest of my life in telling the tale of my failure, simple though it is.

On the evening I wrote about before the inhumation, we sat before the fire and said very little. The apple barrel, which had once seemed inexhaustible, was empty at last, and the flour gone. I had used the last of our cornmeal that night. I had two fishing lines out, and from time to time I got up to look at them; but they caught nothing.