Riven Isles

39 | Another Bullet Cowers. Another Bullet, Coward.

"COBBE!" Captain Avery bellows. The sweat is coming in sheets. It seeps through his stretched clothing, which hangs off his person in a way that makes him appear almost fragile after his unexplainable turn. His face is anything but fragile; fierce with burning gaze. "Find Dorry!"

Cobbe lifts his rifle to the sky and nods in response, catching his leader's distant eye. He starts to turn, but I grab him. I grab him despite the rifle's muzzle finding my throat in a second, and I open my mouth.

"WOODS!" I hear. With a glance, I see the captain staring at the trembling of his own hands. He does not continue.

"Please," I beg the goblin. "What is the poison? I may be able to help."

He spits and glares at my fingers wrapped around his wrist.

I release him. "Please."

"They call it Locker on the sea, for nothing sends you there more wickedly." His eyes narrow and he lowers the rifle. If his stub finger could reach the trigger, held in his dominant, damaged hand, I wonder if he would have fired. "It starts simple enough, nothin' but shakes. Then, yeur skin starts to turn, real slow, to gray, bit o' purple and blue as if yeur veins done turn out their insides. After that, yeu can't move yeur toes, then yeur hands. Soon enough, it's yeur lungs that ain't workin'. But yeur mind goes last. Yeu can see it in the eyes of those taken by it. It is the worst kind of torture. It is the worst way to die. Does that answer yeur question? Did you find it in one of yeur libraries somewhere, yeu pencil-pushing poofter? You ain't superior here. Yeu can't save him without antidote, no matter how many books yeu've read. What yeu can do is what yeur told, and yeu can let me do the same. Yeu were supposed to shoot her. YOU. Look who's the fuck-up this time."

The blunt of his rifle thrusts against my groin and I cry out. My knees drive into the ground and I fall forward with the agony, muscles standing out tense all along my neck. His sandals slap his heels as he jogs away. The tolling bell below sounds less like triumph and more like reprimand. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I meekly pull my skewed spectacles off my nose and crinkle my blind eyes to the smoky sky. Perhaps I should lie here forever. Perhaps the bullet I did not grace her with, or that werewolf with, or even my father with, should grace me. I did this, Cobbe was right. I had one job. What would Cornelius say? What would Walter think?

My head turns to the side, to the clearing below, and I dry my eyes. Over slickened grasses, men stand with their arms at their sides and their sweat-soaked bosoms swelling with the breaths they could have lost. Weapons drop to the earth. I polish my lenses and replace them on my nose, lifting my head higher. Men stand like schoolboys before the dean's door, uncertain and awaiting either good news or bad, shifting uneasily in the sudden silence. The only sound is the bell's chimes, enveloping the isle like a spell.

I cannot distinguish faces. I cannot find Elian's sweet purple scarf, or Cornelius's long coat, or Lydia's blonde braid, or Walter's ridiculous stockings. I peer down at my own socks, no less ridiculous than his, covered in yellow dots over the blue fabric like a child's painting of a night sky.

I press my hand to my head, chuckling cynically to myself, then touch my eyes once again.

"The Witch has fallen, by my hand!" I hear the captain call over the silent battlefield. I crawl to the edge of the ridge to see him, arm draped around the second man from the square. "Anyone who desires to fight further will be considered treasonous and cut to their knees. We have triumphed! I am your captain."

A mechanical clatter rings over the land and heads raise to the waterfall. The ship that had been sent for us, through the wrong cave, sinks on a lift from the white waters of the falls to the gently rippling lagoon below.

"Signal that ship!" Captain Avery orders. "The fight is over. Those unhappy with the change in leadership are free to take that vessel on the morrow and abscond from the Isles forever."

He raises his polished sword. The man at his side raises his, too. Our crew stirs with glee. Their hands raise in the air and their voices fill the clearing with triumphant warmth as they shout and holler huzzahs and "well fought." They dance, some sing. They kneel to the wounded and pat backs and throw hats. The other men, those of her command, hesitantly at first, join. The field roars with mirth, as if the fires and the bloodshed never existed. Men hug and grip elbows and ruffle each other's hair.

It means nothing to me, because I can scarcely bear to look. I watch the trembling of Captain Avery's hand, the one behind his back. The trembling of his sword arm as it, too, lowers and tucks away.

"There will be a feast tonight! There will be drinking and dancing and music!" he announces, to greater cheerful uproar. "Just for you, lads! I could have asked for no finer salts. At ease!"

While they hoot in response, he murmurs to the man next to him and lets him go.

As the rowdy crewmen share merriment on the field, I watch our great immortal captain stagger alone for the woods on quaking limbs and a scraping peg. He drags himself out of sight through the trees like a dying animal, searching for a place to slip away.