Drift

Pairing: Maeve/Sinbad
Rating: M (adult themes)
Setting: After Season 1, assuming Season 2 never happened
All standard disclaimers apply


She did not protest when he claimed her in front of Omar.

She belongs to me. Let her be.

She doesn't belong to him. She never has. She belongs to her hawk more than she belongs to him. But she didn't argue. She held the head of Omar's warhorse in her arms and let Sinbad claim her, beast and human blood mingled on her skin.

His ship rocks softly, moored in the mess of a ruined harbor. Dead fish drift and rot, line each rolling wave with oozing, stinking filth. Bits of children wash ashore, pieces that used to be children, sometimes recognizable, more often not. Over it all ash settles like a shroud. He no longer seeks the stars. They abandoned this place, and him, long ago.

But Maeve hasn't. She's here. Until the early tide, he can keep her. He folds his aching body into her space, hoping she won't notice, praying she won't mind. He'll be an old quill discarded under her shelf, a crumb of incense forgotten behind the door. He tucks himself tight against the hard wooden side of her bunk. He won't disturb her. He won't make a sound, won't try to touch. He only wants to stay near. Like the sultan's horses. Like the cabin boys. He'll never mean to her what her hawk means, and that's fine. He doesn't need to mean anything, so long as he's permitted to stay.

She coughs. He hates that sound, and yearns for it. She shifts in her sleep, the soft slide of skin on canvas, weary crackle of old straw. When this is over, if it's ever over, he'll get them all new stuffing for their beds. Fresh straw, newly dried, hot and sweet with sun. Enough wine to erase the memories, or at least to drown them when they grow too loud. He'd wrap her in silk if he could, as sheer and light as the clear pink of a new dawn. But she doesn't want it. She has a trunk full of rich fabrics, gifts from a grateful queen, and wears none of them.

Even here as he sits beside her bed the tide rushes close, pulls at him. A strange click-clicking sound enters his ears: shrimp prowling beneath the waterline? Or something else, something darker, more insidious, below in the deep?

He entered the water the day after Leah drowned, steadfast, choking back his fear. He shook as he plunged into the surf and sank like a stone. Again and again he stood, threw himself at the water, and sank to the bottom, until Doubar dragged him out, vomiting seawater, blinded by salt. Then back again as soon as his brother released him, insistent on this skill, determined to win this fight. His ignorance and fear killed Leah as surely as al Disar's shove. He refused to let it happen again. No one else would ever die on his watch.

Except many have. He's not a child anymore and he understands better now. A single man has little control over who lives, who dies. Only over his own hands, what he chooses to do with them.

That day he chose to fight. Not al Disar, who fled his home and could not be found, but the other entity he found at fault: the sea. Into the water he went, again and again, over and over, the same battle with the same result, a watery Sisyphus forever at war with an element. The surf pulled and pulled at his body like an old woman carding wool, tossing him between the combs, whipcord-strong, rolling and rough, harsh and unending. He could feel the eternal strength of this enemy, ceaseless and constant, yet still he fought. He struggled and sank, struggled and sank, head dizzy with the motion, the lack of air. He tried to stand; the undertow stole the sand from under him, stole his footing, then his legs. Stole his breath. He opened his eyes to a rush of bubbles, foaming froth as waves broke against rock. His head connected, a cracking blow as he was swept along with the merciless tide.

His body went limp. No Doubar to save him this time. No Dim-Dim. Just a little boy alone in the sea, the same sea that took his parents. His Leah. His world. It stole his breath. His footing. His foundation. Slowly he blinked, feathers of red drifting, drifting before his eyes. His own blood. Immaculate silence below the waves, water moving around him, always moving, but in softer eddies to the lee of the rocks, away from the greatest violence of the tide. Perfect silence. A long, sweet moment of sublimest peace, the toss of the water, feathers of red. He remembers surrender.

And in that surrender came—not wisdom, never that, but understanding. Comprehension. The slow movement of his limbs before his eyes, not against the tide but with it. Part of it. Part of the wave, the undertow. Belly full of salt, blood in his eyes, he moved not like a little boy but like a creature of the sea. Part of the sea, part of the peace. He struggled with a young brain starved of air to cling to this knowledge, hazy and indistinct as his own reflection in a puddle. The sea gave this knowledge but aimed to take him in return: a trade. Insight for his life, a bargain struck without his consent but also without malice. To claim, he realized too late, was the sea's nature. Men who sail strike this bargain willingly. They enter the sea and rack up a reckoning which will someday be called in, water swallowing, enveloping, claiming all with a last, engulfing kiss.

But not just then. Not for him. His body bobbed, buoyed by salt. His drifting foot caught a knob of rock. Earth pulled. Water pulled. He stretched between them, the element which made him and the element which lay claim. His hands opened in surrender, drifted before his face. A boy's open palms. Feathers of blood.

In his case, for whatever reason he still doesn't know, earth won. The sea relented. It could have pulled him to pieces, could have battered him to sludge against unyielding rocks, but it chose to let him go. For a while. He stood upright, neck-deep, chin-deep, streaming salt and blood. Another moment and his lungs would have surrendered as the rest of him surrendered, giving in to the silence, the undertow, the lure of the deep. But they didn't. That time. That first battle.

"Hush, Sinbad. They're sleeping."

She steps softly, barefoot in the golden sand. Yellow sun spills from an azure sky. No smoke. No ash. But at her feet lie scattered bones. Bleached white, gleaming white, they shine like finest ivory, clearest alabaster, nestled in agate-studded sand. Skulls and longbones, ribs and knuckles, individual vertebrae and graceful, curving pelvises, half-buried like treasure washed ashore after a storm. The tide licks lazily at her feet, testing, tasting.

No. No. If it tastes her, it will want her. He puts out a hand, reaches for her wrist to draw her close, away from the lapping tide. She dances just out of reach.

"They're not sleeping." Death is no sleep. He's seen for himself what it is. The screaming and the rending and the fight, red and slick and desperate until surrender. Capitulation. Then silence. But they don't sleep. He sees them drift, the children, endlessly drift, where he plucked them days ago from the sea. They're still there. They will always be there. They drift; he drifts. No one sleeps.

"You're sleeping now, Sinbad."

He is not. He won't ever sleep again. "Don't do that." He reaches once more as she steps further into the sea. It swirls around her graceful ankles, laps eagerly along her skin. He steps closer, afraid she'll disappear if he touches her, like a mirage in the desert. But the sea can't have her. He reaches for her despite his fear.

She's real. Or, at least, she doesn't disappear. He wraps light fingers around her wrist, the lovely, delicate bones. Skin hot with sun, rich as cream. He aches to put his mouth just there, just where his thumb rests against the inside of her perfect wrist. He pulls gently and she yields, exiting the waves. They can't taste her. If they do, the sea will want her. The boys want her. The horses. These are harmless, but the sea is not. It released him when he was a child, and that's a reckoning he'll have to face one day. But not today. Let the sea take the bones. It can't have her.

She looks at him, dark-forest eyes full of little rustles of living things. "It's all right, Sinbad. I can swim."

"I know you can." That doesn't make it all right. All sailors swim. The sea takes them anyway. That's the deal.

But not her. Not now. Not yet. He tugs her gently, one step further onto dry sand. Then another.

As he pulls, the white underside of her arm turns to the sun. It's covered in gore, blood running from gouges far worse than a few splinters. Did her hawk rip her open? He grabs for her wrists, holds her soft arms still, open to the golden sun, the salt-sea air.

"Sinbad, it's not your mess. Do you hear me?"

He hears her. He does. But he also hears the churn of the sea and now, just beginning, swiftly growing, the roar of the pyres. Smoke smudges the horizon.

No. No. He sees her arms torn open, red and gleaming, the inner parts exposed, not hidden away for safekeeping. He presses her forearms gently together in front of her, lowers his head over her wounds like a wild beast guarding his mate. If the sea tastes her blood, it will want her. It will try to take her from him.

"You're not listening."

Not his mess. Not his mess. But she is. His beautiful, perfect mess. The sea can't have her. Omar can't, either. He nudges her blue veins with his nose. Such a sweet color, the aching blue of the sky. She smells like a forest, cool and green, soft and alive. Rich, damp earth and wet wood. Those threads of blue like the finest lace. His tongue licks his chapped lip, touches her skin. Like a wild animal, a creature of forest or field bereft of civilization, he licks. Long, slow strokes, a lion comforting his bloodied queen. Blood rich and mellow on his tongue, like metal, copper filings, iron weights. Her wounds disappear under his gentle tongue like sandy footprints erased by the tide.

"Sinbad." She pulls a hand free of his grip, strokes soft fingers through his wind-tossed hair. Her forehead presses to his, sun-kissed skin, warm breath feathering his cheek. "Things break. All the time, and in different ways. You can't fix them all."

Smoke on the horizon. It's growing closer. He breathes the clear air, releases her arm and draws her close, wrapping her tight in arms suddenly bone-weary. Blood on his tongue. Blood on the tide. It washes their feet, drawing closer, circling the bones with swirling eddies of red-flecked froth. Yes. Let the waves take the bones. But they can't have her. He's keeping her for as long as they get, as long as he's allowed.

She tugs away, pulling from his arms, and no matter how he tries to catch her, like a little songbird she's always too far ahead. She steps further into the sea. Bloody waves lick her graceful calves, the backs of her knees.

"No." He reaches for her again, but she's out of his hands.

"It's time to go."

No. He can hear the pyres growing louder, the roar and crackle of flames. No. "Who says?"

"You did."

No. He'll never order her away. He reaches for her arm, the lovely shapes of her bones. Slippery as a fish, a little bird, she evades him. "Stay," he pleads. He won't touch again if she doesn't want him to. He just needs her to stay.

"Sinbad."

Sinbad.

"Sinbad."

He jerks. He wasn't sleeping. He swears he wasn't.

Warm hands fumble in darkness. A knuckle brushes his forehead. He's on the floor next to her bunk, curled into the corner where he hoped he wouldn't disturb her.

She withdraws, then returns, hands surer. He tries to flinch away, to put up at least a token protest, but his body won't obey. He craves so much. Steady fingers wind through his hair, stroke his forehead, feather-light. In the darkness he could almost believe she had wings. Ash drifts silently through the hatches.

She coughs, rough and deep, the sound torn unwillingly from a throat gone raw. He remembers the flash of red on her lip, licked swiftly away. His tongue remembers the taste of blood, too.

"I heard you coughing." It's the worst excuse he's ever offered for anything. He digs hard, angry fingers in the corners of his eyes. How did he wake her? He doesn't remember sleeping.

"Everyone is coughing. Even you." She stifles another.

He wants her hands back in his hair. Wants to see her. He holds her scent like a lifeline in a storm, so very real and so very female. Sweat and blood, yes, but living woman. Life and magic, the secrets in her dark-forest eyes. His hands reach into the stuffy darkness, slow and inexorable as a lit fuse. It's not a good idea and he knows this, but in this moment he can't fight the need anymore. He's beyond control, beyond instinct, raw and desperate. Fingertips brush her woolen blanket, reject it. He presses further.

There. Warm skin. He bumps her forearm; she gives him her hand in the darkness without protest. He lowers his nose to her wrist, breathes her in. Skin hot with sleep, soft with life. She's smooth as silk under his thumb, save tiny scabs here and there where he pulled slivers of wood from her flesh. No deep gouges. No bleeding wounds. Something in him releases, like too much tension on a taut line. The desperate panic eases. The tide calms.

She extracts her hand, withdraws back into the darkness. Like the sun eclipsed his world is black, but he can't blame her. He wouldn't blame her if she slit his throat, though she probably won't go that far. He should leave. Climb to his feet, head for the door. Use what's left of the night to craft an utterly abject apology.

Straw rustles as she moves, turns her back to him. Then that voice, rough with smoke and sleep, bone-weary but neither angry nor surprised. "Come to bed or go back to your own, but don't stay on the floor. Makes me think I hear rats."

He doesn't move. He doesn't dare. Does she mean it? She should be furious. She has every right. He should not be here. He breathes, balanced on the knife's edge, the excruciating pivot of indecision. He's so tired. But his bed holds no rest, the sky holds no stars. The world exists only here, in the space between them, the echo of his brother's heartbeat across the ship. But she can't mean it. She's half asleep and talking nonsense. He needs to leave.

He can't.

She groans, tired and sour and out of patience. She never makes that irritated sound at the cabin boys.

Out of the darkness her hand returns. Gentle fingers wind in his shirt and tug firmly. He follows her pull as he'll always follow her, the tide to her moon.

"I'm too tired to deal with whatever's going on in your head right now." She settles on her side, tucked between his bulk and the wall. "Go to sleep."

He hasn't slept in days. He won't now. Her bunk is narrow, meant for one and no more, but she grabs his sleeve and slings his arm over her waist and on their sides, nestled together like spoons in a drawer, the fit is...tolerable. And it feels like nothing else in the world ever has. Given permission, he surrenders this fight and presses close. She's so warm. Firm with muscle, hard and sweet. His eyes know this body so well, his nose the scent of her. This is exactly how he knew she'd feel—a warrior queen, his own Athena or Zenobia made flesh, strong and vibrant and so very alive. He closes his eyes to the darkness, buries his nose in the fall of her tangled curls.

"If you snore I'm kicking you out."

He won't. He won't sleep, so there's no fear of that. "Please snore. I'll love it."

"Shut up."

He presses close, folding his body along hers. He's willing to contort in any position to stay, no matter how painful, but to his surprise his ribs and sternum mold easily to the graceful curve of her spine, his body melting, conforming to hers like water conforms to its container. She fumbles in the darkness, finds his hand pressed against the muscle of her belly. Her palm covers the back of his hand; long fingers intertwine with his. She stifles a last cough, a tightening of her belly under his palm, before succumbing quietly to sleep.


The sultan will not back down.

Had Maeve handled him differently he may have capitulated, been willing to compromise. As it stands, sullen and angry, pushed to his limit by a war and its aftermath, he has no patience left for her high-handed refusals. He will not budge, will not bury the children as they are or return them to the sea and have done with it. Sinbad is too tired to argue.

Maeve and Rongar left on the morning tide. She was asleep when he gathered the willpower to leave her cabin, pulling his body from the shelter of hers and rising—at least, he thinks she was asleep. He spent the waning night awake, as he knew he would. Awash in the smell of female skin, the heat of her sleeping body held close to his heart. She said nothing to him when they parted except a brief request to be careful. She looked at him the same way she always has.

Didn't she?

Without Maeve the horses will not work. No shout or muscle or whip will move them. They huddle tight as a herd in a storm, lower their heads to the ground and stand like statues to some fallen and forgotten hero. Their forms as they brace against the ash, the smoke, are weary. Broken. Unmoving. They are not intelligent creatures and they do not comprehend this task, but they understand enough: Maeve is gone. Without her, the herd's answer is clear. They have been trained from birth to serve man, obey man, but in this task they have found their collective breaking point. Without Maeve, they will not even try.

"Where is your witch?" Omar demands, out of patience and out of tact, not that Sinbad has ever known him to have much of either. "What did you do with her?"

"Call her that again and I won't bring her back." The tide shifts, rising slowly. It's restless without her, too. It got a taste and it wants her back. The fires roar, pyres flaming bright, but the children smolder, smoky and sullen. Like a final temper tantrum, they refuse to go quietly.

"I will slaughter every beast here in front of her if she doesn't do her duty!"

Sinbad breathes deep, wills the tide to drown his anger. Smoke and ash. He coughs, spits black phlegm. "What will that accomplish? What will it prove? That you can make a girl cry? Congratulations. Most men can." The tide laps his calves, swirling with foam. It rises higher. "Will you haul your firewood yourself, then? Chain your shoulders to a wagon instead of your beasts?"

"Do not provoke me, captain. I'm very fond of you. But this is my colony. You do not rule here."

"Spare me that fate." He doesn't want to. He wants no part in politics, no part in this tired spot of land, scabbed and barren, burnt and weary. Do fields sown with so much ash even bear? He stares into the hot wind, the sting of smoke as the flames rise high, shimmers of heat rolling along the ground, polishing the air until it shines like water. What was the point of it all? The invaders didn't win, but did Omar either, really? Are the few living colonists any better blessed than the dead they mourn?

"Where did you hide her away?" Omar presses. "Bring her back. The task is not complete."

"No." Maeve does not bend and neither does the Savage Sultan. He holds the memory of her soft scent in his mind, the perfect heat of her sleeping skin. Sending her away was torture, but she couldn't stay. "You rule Basra. Bring a sorcerer of your own, if you will. You have a city's worth at your disposal. You can't have mine."

"The best will not war and the worst are of no use to me." Omar coughs, spits black on the black ground.

"Is that why you want her? In hopes that an apprentice will foolishly do what you know a master would refuse?" Sinbad shakes his head slowly. "I won't allow her to be used like that. She may be an apprentice but she's not your pawn."

"Don't put words in my mouth, captain! I have always treated you and yours exceptionally well."

This is not true. Sinbad wonders if Omar even remembers.

"I ask for so little. I didn't even request your help when that cyclops mess happened—you volunteered. Now I need your woman to calm the horses and stoke the pyres, yet you refuse."

"I do. She's gone to resupply my men. When she returns you can ask her again. But if you want her help, I'd suggest dropping the threats. She doesn't respond well to bullying."


He spends the night delirious with pain. They're dead; he knows they're dead. Everything in him, every internal guide that lights his way knows it. His silent brother. The woman who is emphatically not his sister. He sent them away and now they're dead. The sea took them, as it takes everyone dear to him. As so often, it's his fault. He obeyed Omar. He plucked the children from the sea. This is the reaping of what he sowed, the consequence of his choice. Two living souls in payment for his harvesting of the dead.

He paces dry ground—truly paces this time, disturbing ash with each footstep, a dusty trail following him from the harbor to the campsite where his remaining men have taken refuge. Firouz's breath rattles and whistles high in his nose. Doubar snores, damply complacent. They huddle for comfort in blankets too hot for the climate, dark shadows against the orange-brown night. No one wants a campfire. No one wants horsemeat. They drink well water flavored with smoke and death, wish for strong wine. At least, Doubar does. Even that won't make Sinbad sleep. Not now. Half his crew is dead, and it's his fault. He killed the only light in this darkness by attempting to save her, and he killed Rongar for no reason at all, killed him because he could not bear to let Doubar leave his side. He might as well have slit the man's throat himself.

He's lost the Nomad, too, but this barely registers. It's just as well; he can't lead. He's proven that too many times. No one in the world should trust him anymore.

But what else could he do? What else could he possibly do? He searches his mind, wracks his brain for a solution that does not end in tragedy, and finds none. He saw the blood on her lip, heard the danger in Omar's threats. She couldn't stay.

The tide rises. He removed the children from the harbor days ago but still they drift, endlessly drift, before his eyes. They roll like the morbid shades of dolphins, exposing their backs, their bellies. Salt-stiff, missing limbs, missing eyes. Seaweed tangles his legs, grips him like hands tugging, beseeching, the children's missing arms pulling him down. The orders were Omar's but the sin is his: he took those children back from the sea, took what was not his to take.

The undertow tugs dangerously as the tide rises, frothing his legs. The sand beneath his feet melts away without her heartbeat, the flickers of wings in her eyes.

Wings. Should he try to find her hawk, when Omar finally releases him? A penance for costing the creature its mistress? Or would it be happier wherever she sent it, lost to humankind, eventually going feral, never knowing the truth of what happened?

What hurts more? Salted wounds? Or permanent ulceration—a hole which will never heal?


"She wasn't wrong, you know."

A second night looms. He sits with his remaining men, three forms huddled against the encroaching darkness, the enveloping smoke of the pyres. How long should he wait before telling them? Rongar and Maeve are lost. The Nomad isn't coming back. He opens his mouth but the words won't come. His dry throat aches.

"About the magic?" Firouz coughs. "Why would she be wrong about that?"

"Not that." Doubar shakes his blanket. Ash flies like dust from a beaten rug. "About the kids." He stares at the ground, eyes bloodshot and dull.

Maeve is not a sailor at heart. Was not, he corrects, with a wrench that shatters what's left of his heart. She stumbled into this life when she lost her master. Still she understood better than Omar. The past tense feels like grinding glass into his soft, shattered parts, tiny daggers grating into the wet, soft beating of his heart. Does a heart bleed when it breaks? Swell and darken like a broken leg? Or can it break silently, no outward sign, keeping its incessant, weary rhythm, day after day, crack after crack, until death finally quiets its soundless keening?

"She's seen this before. Our girl." Doubar groans and settles slowly to his side.

Sinbad raises a weary head. "How do you know?"

His brother blinks. Breathes slowly. Stares into the darkness where a campfire should be. "How don't you? You're the intuitive one."

"Doubar."

"It's the way she looks at the dead. Touches them. I don't know. I just know she's done this before."

Sinbad sits quietly under a woolen blanket he does not want, stares at the hideous wrongness of the orange-black sky. Smoke billows from the sullen glow of the pyres. He hasn't seen the color blue in...days? Weeks. At least. Except the perfect lace of her veins. The memory of living skin under his tongue makes him want to shed this world, maybe try again for happiness in another. Something inside him rings empty. Hollow. Not his unfed stomach. Something else. Maeve is gone. Rongar is gone. The sea took them, and what it claims it does not return.

"We've buried people," Firouz says. "Everyone in the world has buried people."

"Not like this. She has."

Firouz coughs.

How does Doubar know?

"Do fish ever fly?"

"No." Firouz coughs again. "Some species have adaptations that allow them to glide in the air for short bursts. But true flight? No. Best leave that to the bats and birds."

So. His dream was wrong. Fish can't learn to fly, and neither can children.

"Those boys are as angry at you for sending Maeve away as Omar is." Doubar throws his blanket over his head. "Calf-eyed sprouts," he grunts beneath it. "The way they sigh after her is beyond annoying. I'm surprised she hasn't lost her patience yet."

"They can't help it. In the animal kingdom the scent of a female spurs males to do any number of unlikely things. There's no reason to assume the same isn't true for humans."

"Hogwash. No pretty girl has ever made me lose my head that badly," Doubar says, which isn't true. "And Maeve stinks as much as the rest of us. She'd say so herself if she were here."

She does not. Sweat smells, blood and horse and smoke and leather, yes. But Maeve, the core of her, does not. Did not. He rested two nights ago, nose buried in the graceful curve of her throat, hungry for the peace of that secret skin. She's rich earth after rain, new grass and sunshine through broad green leaves. He struggles against his brother's thoughtless words, almost opens his mouth to argue. But she's gone. She's gone and she isn't coming back, so it doesn't matter. Not anymore. Doubar is tired. They're all tired. He refuses to fight with his brother over something that ultimately doesn't matter. He'll hold the scent of her in his memory forever, the way life flashed in her dark eyes, quick as the beat of tiny wings. But his brother doesn't need to know.

Winged horses hide in the sky. They charge the stars, dare the clouds to give chase. Silver wings, silver bellies, they glide on blue moonlight. The fish Maeve freed gives them pause; they have never seen such a thing before. But then the smoke comes. It hinders their flight, the surge of their powerful wings. Their nostrils drip with blood and, one by one, they drop like falling stars. The heavens sit silent.

Omar opens the belly of a fallen beast with his dagger. Diamonds spill from dead eyes. He offers the steaming flesh. To refuse hospitality is a grievous sin, but Maeve's ghost will never forgive him if he eats.

"You wear a token of my esteem." A warning.

The chain of that token pulls tight around his throat, squeezing, cutting into soft flesh. His lungs burn. He smells blood—his own, the dead horse's. He can't breathe. Can't breathe.

"Sinbad!" Rough hands shake him like a rug.

He jerks awake, wrenches his body away from the bulk hovering over him. Orange smoke masks the sky. No horses. No stars. Just Doubar. His brother shakes him again. Usually he can tear himself out of that grasp, but not today. He hangs, limp and useless as a windless sail.

"You yelled. Thrashed like a mad dog had hold of you."

Did he? He doesn't remember yelling, doesn't remember any sound but Omar's voice, Omar's threat. His hand grabs reflexively for his throat, finds unbroken skin speckled with hairs. No blood. Omar's amulet swings free against his chest, heavy as lead. He can breathe. He inhales deeply—and coughs.

"Just a dream." Firouz's head emerges from his blanket. "Go back to sleep."

Doubar does, too tired to protest. Sinbad does not, too tired to obey. He didn't cry out when he slept in her cabin. Did he? He remembers with painful clarity the sweetness of her fingers in his hair, real or dreamed or somewhere in between. The tickling warmth of her sleeping breath on his skin. Who was asleep? Who awake? Then the coming together of their bodies, hard muscle under soft skin, sleepy heat and the way she smelled like a woman, letting him hold her for a few quiet hours, just a handful of moments before he sent her to her death.

Does it matter anymore if he screamed? He sent her away. Now he's alone. He digs his hand in the rocky dirt, palms a handful of bitter ash. When she moves, he moves. Where she goes, he goes. The moon and the tide, the light and the sea, except he realized too late. This feeling, it's intolerable. The dream is over. Omar's token no longer chokes him, but still he can't breathe.

Doubar's thundering snores reemerge, Firouz's high, whining breaths. If they soothe the ache at all, it's too little to tell. They fix nothing. Maeve is gone. Rongar is gone.

He yearns for the scent of magic, turns to find it as he always has, seeking the reassurance he's known since he was small, but even as he craves its sweetness it repulses him. Dim-Dim. Maeve. The smell of magic thick with memory, with loss. Female skin. Female sweat. Female sleep. The darkness of her cabin, soft and secret, adrift in the lingering pain of memory.

He asked Dim-Dim once why magic had a scent. The old man lifted his head swiftly from his writing and beckoned him near.

"Say it again, son. Slowly this time. Tell me what you mean."

"It tickles like pepper. It's heavy, like the sky before a storm. Sharp like metal, but sweet, too. Why?"

More than half his life separates him from this memory, and more than half his life he's pondered the look in the old man's eyes at that moment. Still he can't describe it. Dim-Dim was not happy, he knows this much.

"Am I in trouble?"

"No. Never for asking questions. Not of me. The talent for magic comes at a price, Sinbad. I...am not surprised you've been judged to have paid it. Not with all you've lost. But I hesitate. Son, I don't think this is what you want."

It wasn't. It isn't. But that smell is his home.

An empty home now, memories of ghosts who will not return. Dim-Dim is lost and Maeve is dead.

Was he wrong to choose the sea over this gift? Dim-Dim thought not, but Dim-Dim is gone. And he never knew, because Sinbad could never explain, that first fight with the sea. How it tried to take him, beginning this reckoning that will only grow greater with time.

The undertow tries to take him. He scrapes the side of his ship as his footing falls away, the scent of her skin fading on the tide. She's gone. Barnacles slice his skin, dig and tear, peel him back layer by layer like an onion. Salt and blood as the tide rises, the Nomad tall and creaking above him. Except didn't his ship go down?

The waves pull, the water far too deep now for him to fight, too strong for him to swim against. His back scrapes the hull, cleaving flesh from bone, and he bows his head to the tide, to the inevitability of this moment. He took. The sea takes. Where is the unfairness in that?

There's no Rongar this time waiting in a boat with outstretched hands. No Maeve spilling diamonds in the sea. He sent them away. He let the sea take, as it always takes. He's on his own, and it's his fault.


Voices. Has he washed up somewhere? He's so tired. He wants to rest, but they won't stop talking. Probably they're not even real. Most of the things that happen to him lately aren't real, and he can never tell until he opens his eyes to the unending orange-black smoke.

"What the…"

"Hush." She sounds tired, too. Beyond. Maybe as spent as he feels. "Don't."

"But—"

"Doubar, don't."

"But—"

"I mean it. Leave him be."

Yes, leave him be. Let him rest. His back shudders, a single raw, open wound, flayed bare and exposed to the smoking sky. His chest, for whatever reason, feels miraculously unharmed. He can feel his heartbeat, slow and even as if in peaceful sleep.

"Did he touch you? I mean touch you? I'll pummel him if he did."

"No, and it's none of your business. He's fine where he is. He wasn't even awake when he moved."

Is he even awake now? He doubts it. That fierce, tired voice is the most beautiful thing he's ever heard. That's how he knows it's not real.

"Sleepwalking?" A heavy breath. A cough. "We have to get him out of here."

"I know." Oh, that voice. She's not really here. She can't be. Consciousness trickles in, vehemently unwelcome. There's a jagged hole where she belongs, a cavity ripped through him like the barnacles ripped him, flaying him bare. But in this space between sleep and waking he can still smell her skin. His chest lies contoured along the curve of her spine, blissfully painless, a bitterly cruel dream. He prefers the barnacles.

"He won't leave Omar. Not till the job's done." Doubar coughs again.

"I'll think of something."

He surrenders once more to unconsciousness.