Page 36 of The Song of the Void

After breakfast—which we spoon-fed to a laughably disgruntled Reiven—Ashkade pointed out the cut on my face. I had forgotten about it already, but he applied some ointment and a bandage to help it heal.

“Sorry I didn’t notice it yesterday,” he muttered.

“He was in far worse shape than me.”

Ash turned a withering glare on his bodyguard. “Don’t you have somethin’ to say to her?”

Rei tried to roll away from us but didn’t quite have the strength to. He wrinkled his nose. “No.”

“By the Spirits and all the gods out there in the universe, Rei!”

Ashkade could probably stand to learn some swear words. I noticed that he never used any. Or maybe he was just brought up to watch his tongue, like the sweet young farm boy he was.

While I was curious about what Ash wanted him to say to me, I jumped in to save him. “It’s alright. I’m sure he’s still drained, and he’s going to need several weeks of rest so that he can heal properly. Someone’s got to change his bandages regularly, make sure he stays hydrated, and keep him mostly still in bed.”

I hope you don’t mind, Ash.

The Timebreaker plopped down on the stool beside his worktable with a huff, dropping his crutch to the ground in frustration. “I know. Thanks for volunteerin’, Zephra. I’m ‘bout ready to kill him myself.”

He didn’t care to hear any of my or Reiven’s protests, so it was decided against both of our wills. Within the hour, we had moved all the medical supplies and Reiven himself back into our cabin, and I matched his glare as he lay on his cot. Since Ash put me completely in charge of him, that meant I got to lay down the ground rules and treat him like a sickly child. At first, it was hilarious to watch him glower and pout when I dictated his meals and forced him to drink water and only allowed him to get up to use the lavatory. If I turned my back for one second, he’d try to get up and move around, so I had to resort to drastic measures to force him to rest.

“If I see you standing up without me telling you that you can, I’m tying you down to this bed. Do you hear me?”

He grimaced. “Not really interested in your kinks, Blue.”

One stab to the chest wouldn’t be too noticeable amongst his other wounds, would it?

In the days that followed, it quickly felt less like I was in charge of him, and more like I waited on him hand and foot. By the Spirits, the lazy bastard enjoyed it. I tried to annoy him by singing the same Siren lullaby every night while I changed his bandages, but it didn’t seem to work anymore.

A few weeks into our journey away from Redsand Cove, he brightened up considerably. It shocked me how quickly he bounced back and healed; Ash and I had estimated he would be recovering until we arrived at Ghrysim Isle. But that only meant he made it nearly impossible to keep him locked down so he didn’t reopen his wounds. Once he decided on his own that he was better, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he’d get up and attempt to work out. The first time I caught him, he had reopened his arm wound, so I gave him a good thrashing.

“I’m going stir-crazy in here, Blue,” Reiven whined. “I’m bored as hell.”

“Well, I’m stuck in here with you. How do you think I feel?” I snapped, tearing the loose end of the fresh bandage on his arm with my teeth. “Just lie down and sleep.”

“I’m bored with sleeping. That’s all I’ve been doing,” he complained.

I wasn’t about to offer him any kind of entertainment. I meandered back to the hutch we had stored the medical supplies in and reorganized the contents for the third time that day.

Rei groaned at the top of his lungs, locking his fingers together behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling. “Tell me about the Abyssal Deep.”

“What?”

“I’m bored, and you’re the only interesting thing in here. So, talk to me.”

Sometimes, I wondered if he had been born to some wealthy merchants, and that was where he learned to be so bossy and lazy. At some point in his life, he probably had everything he wanted handed to him. Just another reason for us to not get along. Regardless, I told him about what it was like to live in the Abyssal Deep, and much to my surprise, he probed further with oddly specific questions.

“Do all Sirens have legs like you?”

“It would be a pain in the ass to swim all day with surface-dweller legs. The Water Spirit created us with the ability to walk on land, but in the ocean, we have tails.” When I was younger, I had this hopeful—foolish, more like—inkling that the Water Spirit made us the way we were because she didn’t intend for us to be isolated underwater. Then again, she probably didn’t count on the way we were treated by Mourners and pirates, or the war that terrorized us into never rising to the surface.

Reiven stared up at the creaky, tilting ceiling. “And are the stories true? The ones where Sirens lure men into the sea with their songs, then pull them underwater and drown them?”

“Who is telling these stories, fear-mongering pirates?” I slammed the hutch’s cabinet door shut. The bottles I had painstakingly arranged rattled, and at least two of them toppled over from the sound of it.

Reiven grinned. “Yeah, you’ve got me there. What does your tail look like?”

“As if I would ever tell you.”