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She didn’t want to give up. Not without more time to think, and maybe a chance to inspect this corpse. So, she took a deep breath. Sometimes a negotiation was all about attitude.
“Very well,” she said. “Let us do what is right, then. Get the boarding hooks and get ready to tow that corpse.”
“Tow it?” one of the sailors asked. “Surely we’re not going to try to profit by selling the shell?”
“Of course not,” Rysn said. “What kind of craven do you think I am? We’re going to give the creature a proper funeral. And if it seems the beast’s will, we will keep the shell for the luck it represents and present it to the queen. It is fortunate we happened along, so the body might be burned as befits the creature’s majesty.”
“. . . Fortunate?” Kstled asked.
“Yes,” Rysn said. She had trained herself not to feel intimidated when seated among a crowd of standing people, but it was difficult not to feel her old insecurities as so many of them turned to stare down at her, skeptical—even angry.
Attitude, she reminded herself. You will never sell anything if you don’t believe it’s worth the asking price.
“Someone killed this poor thing,” Rysn continued. “Look at those gouges on the side of the corpse.”
“Bad luck,” a sailor said. “Extremely bad luck to kill a santhid.”
“Which we did not do,” Rysn said. “Someone else did, and incurred the bad luck. We are lucky to have found the creature so we can witness what was done to it—and see the body cared for.”
“We shouldn’t touch a santhid corpse,” said Kstled, folding his arms.
“I’ve seen their shells hung proudly in Thaylen City,” Rysn said. “There’s one at the naval academy!”
“Those weren’t killed by malice,” Kstled said. “Besides, they washed up on the shore. Found their way there.”
“Like this one,” Rysn said, “made its way to us, here. How vast is the ocean? And yet we happen across this relatively small body? The santhid’s soul undoubtedly led us here so we could witness and care for the corpse.” She pondered, as if thinking of it for the first time. “This is a good omen. It came to us intentionally. A sign that we are trusted.”
She hid the uncertainty she felt, knowing her argument was full of holes and sinking fast. She decried superstition, but now she relied upon it to make this argument?
Nevertheless, it seemed to work. A few sailors nodded. That was the thing about omens—they were made up. Imagined signals of something nebulous. So why not make them up to be something positive?
“We always consider it a good sign when one washes up on shore,” a man said. “Why is this different?”
“We need to spread the word,” said another, “about how someone out there is killing santhidyn. It wanted us to find it so that the news could spread.”
“Let’s hook the corpse,” Rysn repeated, “and carry it to shore.”
“No,” several voices said from the crowd—but she couldn’t see who. “That’s bad luck!”
“If it’s bad luck,” Rysn said, her voice louder, “then we’ve already invited it by letting our hull touch the corpse. I say the best thing to do now is care for the body. We will burn the body, and leave the shell on a nearby island. We will purchase some floats at a port on our way home, and then tow it to Thaylen City. That’s what the santhid would want: for us to keep the shell as a mark of the respect it showed us.”
The crew fell silent. Rysn had taken part in her fair share of tense negotiations, but this one made her hold her breath, her heart thundering. Like she was trying to contain a storm inside her.
“I think,” the captain said eventually, “that I do see a good omen in this. I’ve always wanted to meet a santhid in the wild. I have burned prayers that one would someday come to me. This creature’s soul must have known that.”
“Yeah,” another sailor said. “Notice how it doesn’t stink? It should smell, rotting like that. I don’t see a single rotspren. Good omen, that. It wants us to come near.”
“Grab the hooks,” the captain said. “If its spirit is restless, I certainly wouldn’t want it thinking we ignored its last wishes!”
The sailors, blessedly, responded to her order. Rysn had given them an escape from their ill luck, and the captain had certified it. That was enough. Some went for the boarding hooks, which had ropes attached for use in holding the Wandersail to enemy ships. Others returned to their posts, to help keep the ship from drifting too far from the corpse.
The captain remained standing beside Rysn’s chair. Tall, proud, in control. Rysn had learned to hold herself in a similar way, but she couldn’t help being jealous of the ability to simply stand there. Exuding control and confidence was so much easier when you weren’t several feet shorter than everyone.
“Thank you,” Rysn said to her.
“We have a charge from the queen to see this mission to its end,” the captain said. “I’d turn around now if I worried about losing my ship, but I won’t do so on a whim.”
“Do you truly believe what I said about this being a good omen?”
“I believe that passionate people make their own luck,” the captain said. Which wasn’t exactly an answer—the Passions, as a religion, believed that wanting something changed fate to bring it to you. Among many Thaylens, superstition and confidence interwove like threads in a rope.
“Thank you, either way,” Rysn said.
“For now, I trust your confidence to move forward, Rebsk,” Captain Drlwan said as sailors returned with hooks. “Take care. This crew is precious to me. I will not waste their lives, if this mission turns ugly.” If it turns out these omens are accurate, she left unsaid.
Rysn nodded and sat back, troubled, watching the sailors cast the lines to hook the santhid body. If they couldn’t get a purchase, someone would have to climb down and—
Sailors screamed, backing away, dropping the ropes as if they’d suddenly burst aflame. Rysn started, then pulled herself up on the railing to look down. Was the santhid alive? It was moving. More undulating, quivering . . .
Disintegrating.
Before her eyes, the santhid broke apart into hundreds of scuttling pieces. Cremlings—crustaceans the length of a person’s thumb—swarmed in the water. Rysn struggled to grasp what she was seeing. Had the hooks disturbed creatures that had been eating the dead santhid? But there were so many, and the entire beast was breaking apart. Including the shell.
Storms. It was as if . . . as if the body had been made up of cremlings. Or sealings, as the ones in the ocean were sometimes called. The water churned and frothed, and in moments nothing was left of the santhid. Even the eyeball she’d felt watching her earlier had broken into multiple pieces, exposing legs and shells on the underside, before swimming away into the deep.
9
Later that night, Rysn sat in a little cove, watching the bonfire send smoke toward the Halls far above. The chill air smelled alternately of the ocean and of smoke, depending on the whims of the wind.
She pulled her shawl closer. She often felt colder than others seemed to, though tonight she didn’t call for Nikli to take her closer to the fire. She needed some solitude. And so she remained in her chair, some twenty or thirty feet apart from the others.
