Chapitre 10: Nothing in the Waves
"No," Serenica said.
It was such a stupid reaction. What difference did her belief make? To what was she even opposed to? Did she really mean that she didn't believe Helen was dead?
But the signs had been there.
Helen was not cut out for this life. It made perfect sense for her to…
"Is she actually dead?" Serenica asked, unable to contain the tremors.
They only came when she felt safe enough to release what had built up inside her body for ages.
"She is," Inky said. No apologies. None of that condolences, sorry to inform you, this is terrible, nothing like that came from him.
She felt reassured. Her lack of visible reaction would not gain his judgment.
"It is my fault, isn't it?" Serenica asked.
She lowered her head, resting the full weight of her existence on her hands.
"Sort of, but I wouldn't worry about it," Inky said, with his voice considerably softer now that she had displayed weakness.
"Yes…"
Serenica tried to catch her breath.
This was a nightmare.
"What matters is that you leave this place for a while." He sounded serious. Unfortunately, Serenica agreed with him.
It felt wrong to escape, wrong to live while Helen was dead, but there was something more going on inside her brain, an undercurrent of emotions she didn't feel comfortable voicing out loud.
She was glad.
She was glad that Helen was dead because anything more than this would have surely killed her in a worse way. Torture was surely within the toolbox of Serenica's current enemies. What was even worse was that Inky could have been the one to do it.
"You didn't do it?" she asked.
He scoffed. "Please. I don't bother with helpless victims. That is below me and Kinley knows it. Don't insult me twice."
"I will not," Serenica said, tasting metal on her lips.
Without even noticing, she had bit through the tip of her tongue. Looked like she was reacting to the news, after all.
Her breath was ragged, every part in her body struggling against carrying on.
"I am sorry I dragged you into this."
She didn't mean to say it, the words were stronger than her pride.
"Don't think of it as a bad thing. You gave me an excuse to get closer to Kinley, that was all I needed."
Inky smiled. He looked devious and yet he was the only one Serenica could trust.
She didn't think for a second that he would step away from the path he had chosen. Royalty was royalty, no matter how little Serenica understood the blue blood and its need to stay blue.
"She is dead and she's better off that way," Inky continued. His voice dropped and a scary thought came to Serenica's mind.
He had the same thought, even though or maybe precisely because he knew what Kinley was. He knew the woman, the way she worked, and the seriousness he had returned to was of a grave intensity. It was as if there was no more reason to laugh ever again if Kinley survived.
"Kinley deals with matters that are out of this world. I mean unnatural. I mean crimes against all laws of society, humanity, and nature. You don't want to pick a fight with her, but she has already picked a fight with you and that advice is meaningless at this point. So, I will say instead: do NOT lose to her."
All matters that had to be settled before setting sail got taken care of. With Serenica having a prize on her head, she was unable to conduct any of those herself, and Gadfly, in his pity, decided to do everything for her. As Serenica knew just which strings to pull, she secured the crew quite a lot of free booze to make the pirates see her in a favorable light.
She knew that the way to a sailor's heart was down his throat. The same went for actual pirates.
She knew she would be the only woman aboard. That hardly mattered to her, as she planned on being solitary for the most part.
However, when she arrived aboard the ship, she fell in love, just a little bit. Since the waves rocked the vessel with a calming softness and the wind was just powerful enough to blow a bit of life into the humid heat, it was way more comfortable near the sea, even though the presence of the liquid grave creeped her out.
People buried their dead in water.
This caused a lot of problems wherever the sea was far away, but here in Neul, with the harbor nearby, rotting carcasses ruining drinking water was not the issue.
Serenica was conditioned to think of water as death.
That was the issue.
Water, out of her control, scared her. Able to render a corpse so lifeless that not even necromancers could raise it back up, the element of death had powers far beyond those of puny mortals. It could gather itself in a wave, a flood, or a whirl of destruction, harnessing a weight so much greater than that of air that even the amount that a bucket could fit was lethal under the right conditions. They said that elements had no minds of their own, that the goddess of death who resided in the waves was but a myth, but somehow Serenica had a hard time believing it.
Often enough a myth was just a rephrasing for a secret.
Serenica believed in the Mother of Worms.
She believed in her existence with her entire hardened heart because some things could not be seen with human eyes or understood with human brains.
She chose to trust her gut feeling on this.
Near a body of water this large, she did feel a presence of something personal, but it was different from the fear of sharks or whales. No, she didn't think anything would surface from the depths. The blue rippled uninterrupted, unbroken. There were no beasts large enough to take her off the deck and drown her.
The power she felt radiated through the salty, fresh air, ruining her peaceful mood.
L’AVIS DES CRÉATEURS 
IkuSaari
IkuSaari I'm back from the hiatus and will update regularly from now on. I might get this one contracted, which means that I will be tied to this folly for another six months or so. At least it isn't harem this time.
Cadeaux
-- Cadeau
reçu État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone